


someday somebody will come and find you

by napricot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, F/M, Fix-It, Flashbacks, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Recovered Memories, Red Room (Marvel), Soul Stone (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:14:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22371619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napricot/pseuds/napricot
Summary: She didn’t make it.Steve’s answer wasn’t a surprise. Some part of Bucky must have known that the only reason Romanoff wouldn’t have been in the thick of this battle with her team was because she was dead. But the feeling welling up in Bucky’s chest, so big and unbearable that it crowded out the air in his lungs until he could barely breathe, so sudden that it nearly brought him to his knees, that was a surprise. He knew whatever expression was on his face right now wasn’t the right one, because Romanoff was—had been—an acquaintance at best, a friend of a friend, and yet here he was, struggling to keep it together at the news.An icy rime of fear crept in over and around the tidal wave of grief. What did his body know that his mind didn’t?
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 86
Kudos: 402





	someday somebody will come and find you

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The National's "So Far So Fast."
> 
> Written for the prompt, "Bucky/Natasha where Bucky saves her from the Soul Stone." Because I watched way too much Sailor Moon as a child, I decided that obviously, he saves her with the Power of Love. 
> 
> Content note: your standard Winter Soldier and Red Room horrors and/or trauma.
> 
> Also, for the purposes of this fic, alternate timeline Gamora goes back to her own original timeline after Endgame.

> See honey, I saw love  
>  You see it came to me  
>  It put its face up to my face so I could see  
>  And then I saw love  
>  Disfigure me  
>  Into something I am not recognizing.
> 
> You see the cage it called, I said come on in  
>  I will not open myself up this way again.
> 
> -Phosphorescent, A Song for Zula

After the battle, after they’d had their reunions and they’d all collapsed in mingled exhaustion and relief and grief, after they staggered back up again to deal with the cleanup, Bucky asked Steve the question that his mind had been unable to let go of since all of his attempts at a post-battle superhero headcount had come up short.

“Steve, where’s Romanoff? Was she—was she in the compound when—”

He didn’t need to hear Steve’s words to know the answer. Steve’s expression of desolate grief was enough.

“She didn’t make it. She—she and Barton went to get the Soul Stone, and—you need to sacrifice someone you love to get it. She made the call.”

 _She didn’t make it._

Steve’s answer wasn’t a surprise. Some part of Bucky must have known that the only reason Romanoff wouldn’t have been in the thick of this battle with her team was because she was dead. But the feeling welling up in Bucky’s chest, so big and unbearable that it crowded out the air in his lungs until he could barely breathe, so sudden that it nearly brought him to his knees, that was a surprise. He knew whatever expression was on his face right now wasn’t the right one, because Romanoff was—had been—an acquaintance at best, a friend of a friend, and yet here he was, struggling to keep it together at the news.

An icy rime of fear crept in over and around the tidal wave of grief. What did his body know that his mind didn’t? His heart beat and battered in his chest like some wild animal throwing itself at the bars of a cage.

“Buck, you okay?” asked Steve, his forehead furrowing in concern. The lines there were deeper than Bucky remembered them being last week—no, five years ago now.

Thankfully, before Bucky had to figure out how the hell to answer him, Banner, Thor, and the flying, glowing lady waved at Steve, beckoning him towards a small landing area they’d managed to clear of wreckage and alien corpses. Steve swallowed hard, visibly shoving all his grief away as he looked towards them and away from Bucky.

“I gotta go, we’re still trying to sort out who needs to head out into space and who needs to stay,” he said, and Bucky let him go.

The animal instinct to nurse whatever wound this was in peace urged Bucky to stumble towards some out of the way part of the battlefield where he could have a baffling breakdown in something like peace. Bucky found a reasonably stable-looking part of the wreckage of the Avengers’ compound and hunkered down. He pressed a hand on his chest and focused on his breathing, the way his healers in Wakanda had taught him, and struggled to breathe in the even and deep patterns of meditation. He tried to go down the checklist like he was supposed to— _are you hurt, are you hungry, are you scared, do you feel unsafe_ —but it was no use. He knew what this was.

Some part of him, what the Wakandan healers always called his spirit or his soul, what Western doctors might have called his subconscious, remembered what his mind didn’t, or couldn’t. It was the same sort of knowing-without-knowing that had made him dive after Steve on the helicarrier. It was the same way he’d known he loved Steve without knowing how or why, long before all of his memories had come back. But where he’d had the evidence of an entire damned museum exhibit confirming that yes, Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were best friends, that was a historical fact and here were the photos and videos and letters to prove it, he didn’t have any goddamn context at all for whatever the hell was happening right now and what it meant about him and Romanoff.

Maybe it wasn’t about her at all, maybe he was just having some kind of delayed reaction to being dead for five years and then alive again. It wasn’t the longest amount of time he’d missed, but it was the first time he’d been literally dead. Nonexistent? Bucky really wasn’t sure how to classify it. Maybe it was some kind of weird side effect. Or hell, maybe he was just crazy. Whatever it was, he had to get his shit together before his med bead sent a distress alert to Shuri or his healers.

“Barnes, you okay?”

Wilson, of course. Bucky lifted his head and tried hard to look like whatever was happening to him right now was just normal post-battle comedown.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, just—I just needed a minute.”

“Well, so long as you’re not bleeding out or anything, it’d be dumb as hell if you died right after being resurrected,” said Wilson.

Then instead of leaving Bucky to have his moment in peace, Wilson sat down next to him with a groan. Bucky nearly told him to fuck off—slightly more politely than that, but _fuck off_ would have been the gist of it—but then he got a look at Wilson’s face. He looked like he needed a moment too: haggard and vaguely shocked, a suggestion of panicked wildness lingering around his eyes. He also looked genuinely concerned though, studying Bucky closely. Wilson was maybe the kind of person who needed to look after someone else to help him keep his own shit together. Bucky could relate.

“I’m fine, just a little banged up,” he told Wilson honestly, then he asked,“Are _you_ okay?”

“I don’t know,” said Wilson. He rubbed at his face wearily. “None of it’s sunk in yet. Steve said Natasha’s dead, and I can’t—I just saw her, you know? But that was five years ago, I guess. Fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bucky.

“You sure you’re okay? You’re crying, man.”

Bucky blinked and touched his cheeks, felt wetness there. He hadn’t noticed, but Wilson was right: he was crying. He wiped at the tears, evidence of a grief he couldn’t understand, but that he nonetheless felt.

“I—I don’t know why.”

Wilson said some nice things about perfectly understandable responses to adrenaline and coming back from the dead, while also gently insulting him in a way designed to provoke him into some light banter. Bucky made a half-hearted attempt to oblige him, but mostly he let it all wash over him. There was something—someone—he needed to remember.

* * *

_“So, which do you want first: the good news, or the I’m not certain if this is good or bad news for you news?” Shuri asked._

_They were halfway through their circuit of the lake, and Shuri had just finished telling him about how she’d harmlessly stripped the trigger words out of his brain. Bucky wasn’t certain what more good news there could possibly be._

_“Uh, good news, I guess.”_

_“Between your own healing factor and our efforts, we believe that over 90% of your wartime and prewar memories have been restored, Sergeant Barnes,” she said._

_“Bucky, please,” he corrected her automatically, and then, as he realized what she’d said and the truth of it, “Holy shit. Pardon my language, Princess.”_

_Because now that she’d said it, he realized: all the foggy and blank spaces in his memory, all the things he’d known were missing and some he hadn’t even known to miss, they were back. The trip to the zoo on his eleventh birthday, the first time he’d gone out dancing and stayed out until the dancehalls closed, his high school graduation, his grandmother’s funeral, Steve’s first big job for the WPA, the anxious transatlantic journey to the Western Front, countless miserable nights spent in foxholes...a lifetime’s worth of good and bad and normal memories were all back, for good or for ill. Bucky laughed in sheer surprise and joy, and found that he was crying too._

_“Thank you,” he told Shuri, and she smiled back at him, happy tears in her own eyes._

_“Much of the work was your own. With Wakandan cryostasis, which is meant to induce and encourage healing, and no barbaric mindwipes, your mind was able to heal itself and restore the synaptic connections to your long-term memories. You will need more sleep than is usual for the next couple of weeks, to finish reintegrating those memories.”_

_“So what’s the other news?”_

_“Your memories of your time as the Winter Soldier...those are at around 50%, at my best guess. Many of those memories never had a chance to enter long-term memory before you were wiped, and for those that did, there is a great deal more serious synaptic disruption and damage. With more targeted, intensive efforts, we could heal that damage and recover the memories, but it is up to you whether we do so.”_

_“That seems like pretty good news to me. Not sure I even want those memories back,” he told her, and meant it._

_The memories he had were bad enough as it was, a series of hellish nightmares that were each horrifyingly real. But the not knowing, the way whole years and decades were blanks to him...that didn’t sit right with him._

_Despite what he’d told Stark in that Siberian bunker, he didn’t remember killing Howard and Maria. He’d watched that video and none of it had felt familiar, nothing had sparked a memory. Hell, he didn’t remember fully half of the kills he was credited with, and apart from a few scattered memories of Karpov and the new Winter Soldiers, he didn’t remember shit about his transfers between HYDRA branches either. At some point, the Winter Soldier had been sold or transferred from Russian-affiliated HYDRA branches, to Pierce in America, and Bucky still had no clue why or how, it wasn’t in any of the records he’d ever found. Did it matter now? Probably not. But the not knowing made him uneasy._

_“That’s entirely understandable,” said Shuri. “But your healers will want to discuss it with you.”_

_So he dutifully talked it over with Thandiwe and Oluchi: the pros and cons, the risks and benefits. He considered it carefully, thinking of the notebooks he’d lost and all their empty spaces, the horrors that could be hiding there. In the end, he told them: no, I don’t want those memories back._

_Leave them where they belonged, in his darkest, haziest nightmares, the ones that left nothing but fear and fury and horror behind when he woke. He didn’t need them._

* * *

Bucky was regretting that decision now. Clearly, he goddamn needed those memories. Whatever the source of these feelings for Romanoff was, it was somewhere in those empty spaces. He needed to go back to Wakanda.

* * *

Once things had settled down enough and the Avengers were preparing to make statements to the press, Bucky pulled Steve aside, intending to tell him that he’d be going back to Wakanda with T’Challa, Shuri, and the others. He nearly changed his mind on the spot when Steve looked about as gutted as if Bucky had just told him he was leaving forever.

Clearly, Bucky had vastly misjudged the impact of his latest death on Steve.

“Steve, hey, it’s—it’s okay. Just, I’m still technically a fugitive? And—”

“You’re not going to be a fugitive for much longer, and the Accords have been suspended, you don’t have to leave,” Steve said, with the same barely hidden desperation as when he’d been trying to convince Bucky not to go into cryo.

“That’s good,” said Bucky, and scrambled for another believable excuse. “But I need Shuri to take a look at my arm, it took some damage in the battle.” Steve went wide-eyed with worry, and Bucky rushed to add, “Nothing serious, I just can’t fix it on my own. I’ll—I’ll come back, after, if you want me to.”

Steve made an awful sound that couldn’t decide if it was a sob or a laugh, and he surged forward to hug Bucky. Bucky very nearly had a decidedly violent reaction to that, but hooray for therapy, because he successfully shoved that reaction down and even hugged Steve back like a normal person.

“Jesus, Buck. Of course I want you to.”

“Okay,” said Bucky, and he thought Steve would let him go then, but he didn’t.

Steve’s hugs were different now. It used to be Bucky who’d squeeze and cling, partly because it used to make Steve get all hilariously ruffled, like a standoffish alley cat who resisted affection before grumpily giving into it. Even after he got the serum, during the war, Steve still used to hug the same way, loose and diffident, if for a different reason: he’d been careful of his new strength, a little afraid of it, even, and Bucky had been skittish and nervy besides, so their hugs back then had been brief. In the 21st century, Steve had apparently decided to toss all that careful diffidence out the window. He always hugged Bucky long and tightly now, holding onto him whenever he could get away with it, for as long as he could get away with it, as if he was making up for the one time he had failed to hold onto Bucky.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Bucky said. “I’m okay, we’re okay.”

“Every time I let you outta my sight, I feel like I’ve lost you for good again,” said Steve.

Bucky could only hold him tighter as silent proof that he was really here, and he felt a sob go through Steve, convulsive like an earthquake that rocked them both.

Right then and there, Bucky’s resolve nearly crumbled. But he needed to know. He needed to understand the source of this brutal grief for Romanoff, the pain lodged inside him so deeply that he could scarcely grab hold of it. There was something important in the still empty, jagged spaces in his mind, and he needed to know what it was. And Bucky’s best shot of doing that was in Wakanda.

“I’ll be back in a few days, I promise, I’ll come back for Stark’s funeral,” Bucky said, even though he’d half-hoped he could get out of it on account of how fucked up and awkward it was to go to the funeral of the man whose parents he’d killed.

“Alright,” said Steve thickly, and finally let him go. “I’ll be here, we’re working on a plan to return the Infinity Stones. Just—call me. As often as you can. Please.”

Now Bucky was the one who was about to cry. Steve so rarely asked for comfort or reassurance, always acting like he needed no such thing, that he could manage without. That he was asking now said a hell of a lot about how shitty the last five years had been.

“Yeah, of course. I’ll be back before you know it,” Bucky said, and hoped like hell it wasn’t a lie.

* * *

Shuri had come back from the dead just like half of the rest of the planet, so Bucky figured she had plenty to deal with and just sent her a medium-priority request for a meeting in her lab with her and his healers whenever they could spare the time. There was plenty for him to do in the meantime: children to reunite with their families, supply runs to ferry out to the more rural areas. After a few hours of being a glorified bus driver, he got a message from Shuri on his comm bead, her holographic face looking pinched and worried.

“Please don’t tell me your idea of ‘medium-priority’ is you being deathly injured or something. Are you okay? Is your prosthetic damaged? Your med bead shows all is well but—”

“I’m fine, my arm is fine, I promise. This really is medium priority. If you and the others are too busy, it can wait until after Stark’s funeral.”

“No, no, come by tonight. Best to get this taken care of now, before I’m stuck in post-apocalypse meetings for the rest of time. You’re sure you’re fine?”

“‘I’m not hurt,” said Bucky.

“That doesn’t mean you’re fine,” she said, frowning.

“It’s—it’s complicated. I’ll tell you tonight, alright?”

* * *

Shuri’s lab wasn’t much changed from the last time Bucky had seen it, and if not for Oluchi, Bucky could have ignored the fact that five years had passed.

Oluchi had lived through the last five years, and while her posture was as straight as ever and her cloud of hair still the same shade of stormcloud gray, the proof of the time and grief she’d endured was in the new lines carved deeply into her face, in the brackets of sorrow around her generous mouth. She greeted Bucky with genuine joy, even as her eyes were still bright with remembered pain.

“I am so happy to see you alive and well again, Bucky,” she said, and gripped his hands tightly. “You were so very missed in the village.”

For Bucky, it had been a week and a half since he’d seen her last: just a quick check-in when he’d told her about how weird normal dreams seemed to him now that he was no longer constantly dreaming memories. He’d asked her if a dream about finding a civilization of talking fish in the lake was even normal at all, because it sure hadn’t _felt_ normal, which had made her laugh and reassure him that yes, it was normal, and in fact just the other night she’d dreamed that she’d ridden one of the Border Tribe’s rhinos to the moon.

Bucky had scarcely had time to miss her, and yet he found now that he had, and that the grief and joy she was so unashamed of showing him made him feel young and shy, like an overwhelmed kid. It seemed impossible that he could have been missed or mourned here, and yet, he must have been, if Oluchi said so, if she was looking at him like this, her eyes sparkling with a bittersweet kind of fondness. Oluchi had never once lied to him, after all.

“Thanks for coming,” he told her. “I know there’s gotta be a lot of other things for you to deal with right now—”

Oluchi tutted him into silence. “There is a great deal of healing and work to be done here in Wakanda, yes. But you cannot attend to it until you deal with what brings you here to us. Consider this triage, Bucky.”

“Alright,” he said. “But I’m gonna help, when things are more settled. Figure I’ve got experience with the whole losing years and coming back to a different world thing.”

“You have some wisdom of your own to share, Elder?” teased Oluchi, and Bucky flushed. “We will welcome it, Bucky.”

When Thandiwe arrived, she took one look at him and knew something was wrong. She always did.

“Ah, Ingcuka, what is this grief you’re carrying? Haven’t we all been returned to life? Is it not time for joy, rather than grief?”

It was unfair, but he hoped, desperately, that she’d be able to see what he couldn’t, that she could sift through the mess in his head and pluck out the source and cause of all this awful mess of feeling, that it would be something simple like _you are only grieving the time you lost, not just these five years, but all the lost decades too, it will pass_. And then they’d walk the plains and the hills to find some quiet and pretty spot, where they’d meditate until Bucky realized that she was right, and he could let the feeling pass.

But all he could say was, “Not all of us, no,” before the grief rose up again, choking out any other words.

“Is this about Stark?” asked Shuri tentatively, and Bucky shook his head.

“No, it’s—Natasha. She’s dead, and I—” Just saying the words stole the breath from his lungs. He had to swallow hard and take a couple of deep breaths before he could continue, the words rushing out. “I need the rest of my memories back, Shuri. I need to know why the hell I’m feeling like I just lost someone important to me. Because I must have known her, if I’m feeling like this, but I don’t _remembe_ r, and she never said anything, and I don’t understand what the hell is happening.”

Thandiwe gently directed him to a stool, and put one big hand between his shoulder blades, the silent and firm press of her palm telling him to _breathe, slowly now_ , until he matched the deep and even pace of her breaths. Then she tipped his face towards hers, and studied him. Bucky knew other people found her usually silent directness discomfiting, but Bucky never had. There was an openness to her focus, a willingness to both see and be seen despite the scars that covered half of her face and neck. She never failed to make Bucky feel a little more settled in the world, and now was no exception.

“Tell me everything,” said Shuri, already calling up scans and programs that she flung onto the transparent screens of the lab, so Bucky took another deep breath and tried to do just that.

* * *

There wasn’t much to tell, in the end. Logical deduction pointed to Romanoff’s time in the Red Room and Bucky’s time with Department X as the only possible period they could have known each other. Well, that and the time their missions had crossed and he’d shot her, but Bucky doubted all this was about any kind of long-delayed guilt for that. She’d breezily accepted his apology for it years ago, in one of their only one-on-one conversations. From there, they moved on to possible external causes, and came up empty. Shuri ruled out any alien or serum-related weirdness, or any post-resurrection side effects: his scans now were no different than his baseline from before the battle. After controlling for his enhanced physiology, his scans were on par with Shuri and Thandiwe’s too, so whatever this was about, it wasn’t a side effect of resurrection by magical space rock.

“That’s good, I guess,” said Bucky, and Shuri hummed thoughtfully.

“Maybe,” she said, then asked, “She never said anything to you? Never made any reference to a shared past?”

Bucky shook his head. “Not like we had too many opportunities to talk. When we did, it was, you know, the way you talk to a friend of a friend. Mostly we just ragged on Steve, or talked about whatever mission they were on.”

She’d felt familiar, maybe, but he’d chalked that up to the whole Black Widow thing. He’d been attracted to her too, in the distant kind of way where he had no intention of doing anything about it—they were both fugitives at the time and he was a goddamn mess, romance wasn’t exactly a priority—but that seemed natural enough, given her beauty and her competence and her kindness. And yet, none of that could account for the way he was feeling now, this desolate, furious grief.

“So. To sum up, you may have known her during your imprisonment, but you had no relationship with her after you regained most of your memories and your mind. You could leave it at that,” suggested Oluchi. He blinked at her in surprise. That didn’t sound like the usual kind of advice she gave him. “However you knew her, whatever you two may have been to each other, she is gone now, Bucky. How will it help you to dredge up terrible memories?”

“I just—I feel like I have to know,” Bucky told her. “I have to know why I feel like this.”

“There’s no way to pick and choose the memories you’ll get back,” warned Shuri, frowning with worry. “It will be all of the Winter Soldier memories that we did not previously recover.”

“I cannot recommend it,” said Oluchi, shaking her head.

“Back when I first got out of cryo, you said it would help,” countered Bucky.

“I said it _could_ help you process some aspects of your trauma better, yes, and that it could lessen some of your anxiety to recover as many of your memories as possible. But even then I told you that it could very well do more harm than good, and now, I counsel you that it will surely do so.”

“I can’t see that it would do anything but hurt you,” agreed Shuri. “I say you should wait, see if any more memories return on their own, naturally, as a result of your healing factor. With guided meditation, maybe even hypnosis, perhaps we can learn more about how you knew the Black Widow, and you will not have to re-traumatize yourself more than is necessary.”

“Thandiwe?” he asked, and looked to her.

For all that they’d spoken the least, passing their long hours together in mostly silence, it was Thandiwe who knew him best. It was Thandiwe who’d sat with him after the worst nightmares, Thandiwe who’d been there when the simple act of attempting meditation had drawn out the poison of his rage against HYDRA and his pain until he’d screamed with it, Thandiwe who’d looked him in the eye, unflinching, as he’d struggled and fought his way towards whatever scraps of peace he could find in himself. If she said he shouldn’t do this, if she said he should try something else, he’d listen and do as she said.

“Memories or no memories, you are grieving already,” she said slowly. “It seems to me you will feel this pain no matter what. And if you grieve so fiercely now, you must have loved just as strongly. The knowledge of love is always worthwhile, I think, especially love in such darkness as you must have borne then.”

“It won’t be easy,” cautioned Oluchi. “There is no guarantee you will find the answers you seek, and you may simply recover more traumatic memories.”

“I mean, how much more traumatic can it get, really,” joked Bucky weakly. “You’ve remembered ten different kinds of torture, you’ve remembered them all, am I right.”

“You are not funny,” said Shuri flatly.

“That’s not really how trauma works, no,” said Oluchi, her mouth pressed into one tight line of worry, and okay, tough crowd. Bucky’s darker jokes had a limited audience, he supposed. “I will tell you honestly, I have genuine concerns that recovering more memories of your time as the Winter Soldier will set your recovery back, perhaps significantly.”

“Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t,” said Thandiwe as she met his eyes, her dark gaze as steady and certain as always. “But whatever you learn, I believe you have the strength to bear it.”

Bucky swallowed hard and hoped to any god who was listening that she was right, that he wasn’t signing himself up for a mental breakdown.

“I have to know. I know it’s going to hurt, I know I’m going to get memories I never wanted back. But I have to know what I’m missing. It’s going to drive me crazy otherwise.”

“Alright,” said Shuri unhappily. “You will need to enter a modified form of healing stasis for this. Give me an hour to prepare the healing cradle.”

“We will meditate until then,” said Thandiwe, and it wasn’t a suggestion.

“And we will be here when you wake,” said Oluchi, her voice was calm and firm, smiling at him even though worry made deep grooves in the lines of her face.

“Thank you,” Bucky told them, for probably the thousandth time. “All of you, thank you. I know there are probably a hundred other things that are more important right now—”

“And we will get to them in time. Right now, we are here with you,” said Thandiwe.

Shuri nodded in agreement and smiled tightly at him, worry making her look older, more severe, her resemblance to the Queen Mother suddenly stark and clear.

“But don’t thank us so soon, Bucky,” she said. “This will not be pleasant.”

* * *

The slide into healing stasis was an easy and numbing thing, nothing like the deathly chill of cryo, and in his last moments of awareness, Bucky thought _maybe it won’t be that bad_.

He was wrong. It was that bad.

* * *

When he came to, he heard singing, a woman’s lone, soft voice. The words and tune failed to cohere into any kind of meaning, they were barely audible over the noise in his head, but he knew—there’d been no singing in the Red Room, in Siberia, in any of the hellholes he’d been stored in, so he was safe, probably—and he slipped under again.

He didn’t want to be awake anyway, because if he was, then it was real, it had all been real, and Thandiwe was wrong, he couldn’t bear it, because forget about the straw that broke the camel’s back, this was the avalanche that would crush and choke him once and for all. He’d almost escaped, he’d almost clawed back something like his humanity, but they’d taken it all away again and how the _fuck_ had he ever forgotten Natalia, and now she was—she was—

* * *

“Good morning, Soldier.”

Warm lips pressed a smiling kiss to his right shoulder, then his neck and jaw, and as good as it felt, he didn’t open his eyes yet, indulging in the luxury of a slow and safe awakening for once. For once, he knew exactly when and where he was, and who he was with, and how none of those things had a single damned thing to do with a mission, not right now. Right now, they had three days before extraction, three days free of handlers and surveillance and training and treatments and calibrations. Three days of freedom, or the closest thing to it the Winter Soldier and Black Widow were ever likely to get.

“Soldier,” she said again, singsong and a little chiding, before she nipped sharply at a spot just below his ear and he gasped, back arching as pleasure shot down his spine in one zinging flash.

He opened his eyes, and was met with the sight of sunlight on red hair and sparkling green eyes.

“Good morning, Natalia,” he said, and she nipped him again as she draped her body over his, bare skin on bare skin, an unimaginable wealth of sensation, all of it warm and soft and good. He sighed and pulled her closer still, let his hands settle on the dip where her back met her waist.

“Ah ah ah, what happened to calling me Natasha?” she said, and he smiled, like that was a reflex just like breathing was, though he knew it wasn’t. Or if it was, it was a reflex that came back slowly, that had to be relearned or rediscovered.

“I wouldn’t want to be overly familiar, Widow.”

“Oh, I think we’re very familiar to each other by now,” said Natasha, her smile turning delightfully wicked, and he should have let her show him just that, should have let this morning be a perfect respite, but—they were never free, not really.

“I won’t risk slipping up in the Red Room,” he told her, no longer smiling. “If they hear me calling you Natasha—”

There would be punishment. For him, or for her, or both of them, it didn’t matter. That kind of familiarity wasn’t tolerated in the Red Room, not from them. He could end up back in the chair again, and he couldn’t risk it, not before—

* * *

_“You can’t have him out of cryo for this long, the instructions are clear—“_

_“Nonsense, the Soldier is still operating at peak efficiency, and we have the trigger words for compliance if he gets out of line. I don’t know what the hell the Germans were doing, but here in Russia we don’t let valuable, skilled assets waste away in freezers, we put them to work, he’s too goddamn expensive to—”_

_“Fine, but he’s not a goddamned schoolteacher, the Widows already have trainers—”_

_“The Widows can be better. They must be better. If the program is to succeed, if we are to get more funding for my experiments, then we can—”_

* * *

“Six missions together and you still won’t tell me your name. I’m beginning to think you don’t like me, Soldier,” she said, and though her tone was sly and teasing, reflexively flirtatious, she was biting at her lip nervously.

She still had tells. He should have considered it a shameful weakness, should have reported it to her handlers, but he didn’t. It was—charming. Sweet. And the Soldier had precious little sweetness in his life.

“It’s not personal,” he said, surprised at the dry humor leaking into his voice, the small smile he could feel lifting the corner of his lips without any conscious input from him. “I don’t have one.”

Natalia scoffed. “Of course you have a name. You could just say it’s classified, you know, I’m not a damned child.”

“No, I—it’s the truth. I don’t have a name. Or—I don’t remember it.”

This troubled Natalia for some reason, an anxious frown tugging her generous lips down before she recovered and smiled.

“I’ll just have to call you my Soldier then,” she said lightly, and his own smile widened, a pleased sort of warmth on his face.

“Very familiar of you,” he teased. “Then I’ll have to call you Natasha, so we’re even.”

* * *

“You need to stop treating me like a person.”

It was stupid to have this conversation here, on the damned shooting range, but it was the best he could do at short notice. To her credit, Natasha didn’t flinch, didn’t give any indication that they were talking about something other than guns, and to his dismay, she too easily picked up the disjointed thread of his reasoning.

“But you _are_ a person. I don’t care if you don’t have a name, I’m not going to—”

“You need to stop it, Natalia. It’s not safe, for either of us. You _smiled_ at me in the training room.”

And he’d almost smiled back.

How long had it been, since he’d last been in cryo? He didn’t know. Time still slipped away from him, every time he woke up. Even with regular sleep, he woke up and he was never sure: had it only been a few hours, or had it been longer? Without memory to rely on, he was too often unmoored from time, and he didn’t _know_ —had it been months, years, he couldn’t be sure—but a year, surely it had been at least that long? Maybe longer, maybe even two years, and any day now they would put him back in the ice. He couldn’t remember ever having been awake this long before. They’d see he was malfunctioning, more human than asset, no longer at peak efficiency and they’d put him in the Chair then back in the damned ice, and if Natasha kept being like this, looking at him like this, talking to him, kept touching him in ways that didn’t hurt, treating him like a person—the way he remembered, maybe, like he’d been more than the Soldier once and could be again, he’d—

“So what? They can’t punish us for successfully reproducing normal social norms. We work well together, our success rate is so high that even Madame thinks so and she spent _months_ trying to keep you from the Widows.” He just shook his head, unconvinced, and she continued, “No one knows about us, I swear it, I’ve been careful, I haven’t given anything away.”

“I know. I know you’ve been careful, but you keep—Natasha, please. If you keep acting like I’m a person, then I’ll forget I’m not supposed to be. And I can’t risk that. Not here, not now.”

He looked at her then, and the lack of understanding on her face filled him with equal parts love and despair. Broken, half-machine that he was, she still loved him too well to know what he was asking of her. She saw the man before she saw the weapon, and he wished, for both their sakes, that he could be a man like any other, one with a name and a past instead of empty spaces that rattled and howled. 

“You _are_ a person,” Natasha insisted. “I don’t care what ridiculous tales the handlers tell us to try to scare us, you’re just a man. If the Widows can have names, if we’re not treated like walking, talking bombs, I don’t understand why you—”

* * *

In the end, that was what damned them.

Not fucking: that could have been forgiven, could even have won Natasha praise and made the Soldier the butt of a lot of ribald jokes. Getting a little too creative on missions and testing the limits of their leashes wouldn’t have damned them either, not when their results were so good. But the stubborn, too-clear proof that they were human, that they were just Natasha and her Soldier instead of the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier, that there was enough human in them to love someone—as much as they could love, anyway—that was unacceptable. That was a weakness that had to be burned out of them.

He didn’t know what had given them away in the first place, what had caused enough suspicion that their last mission together was bugged and surveilled. Maybe he’d been caught calling her Natasha, maybe his touches during training had lingered just a little too long, been a little too gentle, maybe the handlers had just noticed the way they looked at each other. Maybe smiling at the sight of her had truly become a reflex as unnoticed as breathing, there for everyone to see.

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it ended here, with guns pointed at both of them, with the words and the chair and Natasha’s wide, horrified eyes.

Still, she tried. Head held high, terrified out of her mind, and she still tried. “We’ve done nothing wrong, we completed our mission, we upheld our covers—”

One of the handlers slapped her. “Is that what you’re calling fucking the Soldier?” he demanded, then slapped her again. The Soldier tried to break free of the men holding him, but it did no good—they slammed a cattle prod into the base of his spine and the voltage took his knees out from under him. “Is that what you’re calling making plans to defect? Huh? That’s completing the mission, is it? I knew this was a fucking bad idea. Karpov, deal with the Soldier.”

Karpov wrenched him back up onto his feet again, and began to recite the words.

“Longing, rusted, seventeen…”

The walls in his head were coming down again, and he knew, he _knew_ what they would make him do when no wasn’t a word he even knew he could say—

“Natasha, I’m sorry—”

* * *

He’d put her in the chair. They said the fucking words, and he’d _put her in the fucking chair_ , and listened to her scream and he hadn’t felt a fucking thing, hadn’t known how to, and then he’d sat in the chair himself like a good little wind-up toy, and they’d turned it on and he’d heard the buzz and crackle of it, felt it in his head and his spine and everywhere and it didn’t stop, it never stopped, it would burn everything out for good this time and there’d be nothing left of him, not even these haphazard, nameless scraps—

There wasn’t anything but the ice after that. Not for a long time.

* * *

“Bucky, wake up. I know it is hard, but it is time to get up. Open your eyes, there you go.”

He opened his eyes and saw Thandiwe’s scarred face, the smooth and shining scars on her dark cheek catching the bright light of the lab.

“How long,” he asked her, and scarcely recognized the harsh rasp of his own voice. Had he been screaming?

“Ten hours,” she said. “How do you feel?”

All he could do was stare at her. How did he _feel_? He was vaguely aware of his head hurting, with an ache like an omnipresent, concussive thud, but that pain didn’t even rate a mention. He felt like the fucking _Titanic_ was how he felt, like the grief that had gutted him when Steve had first told him about Natasha had been a barely visible iceberg, small on the surface and vast underneath, and now the wound it had torn open was sinking him.

Whatever he looked like, whatever Thandiwe saw, it must have been bad, because her usual stern steadiness turned gentle, and that was enough to make him break. She joined him on the cot and held him as he sobbed, his lungs heaving with it until he was sure he’d never breathe again without it tearing him in half.

* * *

The irony of it all was, the worst thing wasn’t remembering all the torture and murder and freezing and fighting and mindwiping. There was nothing new about any of that, those terrors were worn and familiar by now, and their very sameness turned them all into one mass of pain and horror so heavy that he couldn’t do anything but bear it with numb acceptance.

No, the worst thing was remembering those moments when he’d almost been a person again. It was the contrast, he supposed, and the futility of it. Natasha had cared for him; she’d seen the shattered, nameless pieces of a person, more weapon than man, and she’d still cared. She’d still _seen_ him, the person under the programming, and she’d thought he deserved to be more than a weapon, that they’d both deserved more than what the Red Room gave them. What broken pieces were left of him had managed to love her. And it hadn’t mattered. It had all been taken away, erased, like it had never been real at all.

He remembered all his escape attempts now too: all the times he’d tried and failed to get out, and worse still, the times he’d succeeded, once even for weeks, until HYDRA had found him again and wiped the memories away, and then wiped away the ability to even escape at all with ten little words that turned him into a thing.

“Tell me what hurts most,” said Oluchi, as she stroked his tangled hair back, and he didn’t know how to answer her. She waited though, still stroking his hair, and eventually, he had an answer for her.

“That none of it mattered. Nothing I did, nothing I felt, nothing _we_ felt—it didn’t matter. They just took it away.”

“You have all of it back now,” she said. “And now it is your choice what to do with it, with your pain and your love. It all matters now.”

But Natasha was dead. There was nowhere to put the love some other version of him had once had for some other version of her, and it was too late to know if that love could have grown again. All he had were memories so sharp and jagged that they hurt even to hold.

* * *

After a full hour of Thandiwe sitting with him, exuding a very strong, utterly silent aura of _get your ass up, White Wolf_ while silently demonstrating the deep meditative breathing he should have been doing, he finally found the strength to get up.

“Good,” she said with an approving nod. “Let’s go,” and they went.

Walks with Thandiwe were usually productive rambles, and this was no exception. In all the chaos of people returning, some of the livestock in the border lands had gotten loose. Rounding up goats and cattle was far from urgent or glamorous, but it did need to be done, so he and Thandiwe spent a few hours doing it, while Bucky tried to let the work and the outdoors distract him from some of his misery. It worked, a little. The weight on him felt a tiny bit lighter, anyway.

“What did you remember?” asked Thandiwe, on their way back to Shuri’s lab, and Bucky told her.

He resigned himself to a whole new regime of meditation and confronting his feelings of helplessness or whatever it was Thandiwe would deem necessary for his continued recovery, but to his surprise, that wasn’t what he got. Instead of the grave resolve and understanding he expected from her, she smiled at him, a rare, joyful triumph in it.

“Those memories were worth recovering,” she declared.

“ _What_?”

“You don’t agree?”

“Not sure I do, no!” he said, gaping at her.

He’d just poured out his damned soul here, a torrent of awful misery and regret and helpless anger, of a grief that had no chance of closure, and she was telling him it was _worth it_? Thandiwe hummed and let him think it over while they walked.

“I’m glad I know how Natasha and I knew each other,” he said eventually. “It’s just the rest of it I can do without.”

“Even the knowledge that you loved each other?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“I will tell you what I think, in the perhaps vain hope that it will prevent you from spending weeks or months wallowing.”

“Jesus, tell me how you really feel,” muttered Bucky, a little taken aback. Thandiwe usually let him come to his own conclusions, in his own time, with only some gentle guidance from her; that she was being so forthright now was a surprise.

“What can I say, being resurrected has given me something of a sense of urgency,” she said dryly. “So I will tell you this now: you’ve recovered terrible, painful memories, yes. But look past the pain, Bucky, and see: _you never gave up_. You kept fighting, kept escaping, and even held onto enough of yourself to love someone else. HYDRA had to erase you and unmake you, again and again, and then enforce obedience beyond even that.”

“But none of it _mattered_.”

Thandiwe shook her head, short and sharp, and clicked her tongue against her teeth in exasperation.

“Did you know that then? It is you, now, who is deciding that none of it mattered. Make a different choice. See what I see: that you _did not give up_. Not then, and not now, when most people would have surrendered to their pain and despair. Let that knowledge give you strength, rather than pain.”

It was more or less what Oluchi had told him too, but only now did he really understand what she’d meant. Amnesia had the odd effect of alternately giving you no perspective, and too much: recovering memories sometimes dumped him right in the middle of them, reliving them as if they’d just happened, and other times gave him an outsider’s distance, like he was watching a film reel of someone else’s life. He’d been mired too deeply in these most recent recovered memories, too caught up in misery. But if he stepped back, if he accepted Thandiwe’s perspective... Thandiwe let him process it in silence, until they reached Shuri’s lab.

“Alright. I’ll try to see what you see,” he told her. “Still hurts, though.”

“Well, there is no cure for grief, short of resurrections like ours. And that, I think, is not a miracle we are likely to see again.”

* * *

After he cleaned himself up and assured Shuri he was doing about as well as could be expected, Bucky called Steve. He only belatedly realized that a video call was maybe a bad idea, as the expression of intense relief on Steve’s face quickly shifted to worry.

“Hey Buck, you okay? You look…”

Like shit, right, on account of the traumatic memory recovery. He’d have to tell Steve what he’d learned at some point, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him now. Steve had known Natasha far longer and far better than Bucky ever had, he wasn’t about to put his shit on Steve when Steve had his own grief to deal with.

“Just a bad night, I’m fine, talked to my therapists and everything,” he said.

Steve still had the forehead wrinkle of worry going. “And your arm?”

“All good. Seriously, I’m fine, Steve. Just, y’know, post-battle nerves, I guess.”

Bucky hoped that would be the end of it, but Steve’s forehead wrinkle of worry only transitioned to the sad face of guilt.

“Shit, of course,” said Steve, rubbing at his face. “I keep forgetting, it was just one long day for you. I’m sorry you got dragged into the fight again, Buck. I know you didn’t want to—”

“None of that now,” Bucky interrupted. “I wasn’t about to hang out on the farm while everyone else was saving the universe, come on.”

That got a small smile out of Steve, thankfully, and they traded updates for a few minutes, on how recovery efforts were going and what to do next, and it was almost normal, almost like five years hadn’t passed at all and this was just like any of their other Skype calls while Steve was out fugitive Avenging. But unlike any of those calls, part of the way through this one, Steve just started crying, silent tears tracking down his face. Fuck, Bucky shouldn’t have left him, he should’ve waited a little longer to come back to Wakanda.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, just—you’re back. You’re alive. I—you don’t wanna know the number of times I started calling you, only to remember—”

Steve covered his face with his hands, and Bucky scooted closer to his comm bead, as if he could somehow reach through the hologram and comfort Steve.

“Hey, it’s okay, Steve. I’m here, alright? I’m okay. I’m—I’m sorry I keep dying on you,” he said, helplessly, and Steve let out a watery laugh. When he brought his hands back down, he was smiling even as tears kept streaming down his face.

“Jesus, Buck, it’s not like it’s your fault.”

Maybe not, but Bucky sure felt like shit anyway.

“The past five years were real bad, weren’t they,” he said, as if he needed it confirmed.

“Pretty much the worst, yeah. Only reason I got through it at all was because of Nat—”

Steve stopped, closed his eyes. Bucky could see him trying and failing to shove his grief back down, and he’d been through enough therapy to know that was a terrible idea.

“Can you—you can talk about it, you know. With me,” Bucky offered, and Steve shook his head.

“No, I’m okay, it’s fine, you’ve got your own stuff to deal with—”

Had this been how Steve had spent the entire last five years? Insisting he was fine even after half the damned world had turned to ash?

“Steve, I spent a not insignificant part of my day crying all over Oluchi and Thandiwe, and it sucked, but let me tell you, I feel a hell of a lot better now. You gotta let it out. Please don’t tell me you spent the last five years just, I don’t know, permanently stuck in the denial and repression stages of grief—”

“I didn’t! I had a support group, I—shared things! And repression’s not even a stage of grief. It’s just that there’s still work to do,” insisted Steve.

“Learn to multi-task,” Bucky told him. “It’s working great for me.”

Steve’s face spasmed in some hilarious mix of annoyance, sadness, and affection.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll give that a try, Buck,” he said, exasperated, then he just looked at him for a long, long moment. “I missed you so fucking much. I just—I don’t know how to do this without Natasha. We won, we did it, and she’s not here. She never gave up, you know? I had to step back, after we found out the Stones were destroyed, there were days I couldn’t even get out of fucking bed, but Natasha never gave up.”

Steve’s words winded him worse than any punch to the gut he’d ever taken, and it took every last bit of self-control Bucky had to keep his expression even. He simultaneously wanted Steve to tell him everything, he wanted to know who Natasha had become without the Red Room’s shackles, wanted to know how she’d gotten through the last five years, but he wanted Steve to shut the hell up too, because this hurt badly enough already. It was just layer on layer of loss: the Natasha Bucky had known, and the one he’d never had the chance to, who he could never know now. A video call had been a bad fucking idea.

“Yeah?” he said, and Steve didn’t seem to notice how rough his voice was.

“She never stopped trying to find a way to get everyone back. She didn’t forget about the people left behind, either. She—she set up some these homes for the kids who’d lost their parents, and she was so good with those kids.”

_Keep it together, Barnes. You can fall apart later, Steve needs you now._

“I’m so sorry, Steve,” he whispered. “Were you two—did you—”

“Go steady?” asked Steve with a crooked, sad smile. “It’s never been like that with us. We were family, you know? Especially after—after everything.”

“Yeah,” said Bucky, and swallowed down a queasy mix of relief and regret. “I’m glad you had each other, at least.”

“It’s not fair, Buck. She should be here.”

“Yeah, she should,” he said, and maybe it was a bad idea to ask, maybe he was just pouring salt in Steve’s wounds, but he had to know— “You’re sure there’s no way to get her back?”

Steve didn’t take the question amiss at least, he just sighed and rubbed at his eyes.

“Not without someone else dying. That’s how the Soul Stone works, apparently. You need to sacrifice someone you love to use it. That’s what Barton said, anyway.”

“Well that’s bullshit.”

Steve frowned. “Barton wouldn’t lie about that. He’s a wreck over this, he thought he should’ve been the sacrifice.”

“That’s not what I—” Bucky shook his head. “I mean, what kind of shitty magical space rock is this. There’s gotta be a loophole or something, right? There always is, with this sort of thing.”

Bucky was thinking of fairy tales and myths, sure, but fuck it, he’d just been brought back to life by omnipotent space rocks. That felt like some real fairy tale shit to him.

“You think we haven’t talked about it already? No, there’s no take backs with the Soul Stone, and the other Stones aren’t any help. At least not without risking anyone else or making the whole multiverse unstable. And anyway, I’ve gotta take the Stones back to when and where they belong, or else a whole bunch of timelines are going to collapse, and a lot of people will die. Natasha wouldn’t have wanted that. ”

Maybe not. But Steve had just told him: Natasha had never given up. Not even after the literal apocalypse. And as had recently been pointed out to Bucky, he was a stubborn son of a bitch.

When he’d been beyond even the memory of prayer or hope, when the very words hadn’t meant a damn thing to him, he still hadn’t given up. Maybe it had only been the sheer animal instinct to survive, to escape, but if he could choose now, if he could choose how to make it matter, then he’d choose Thandiwe’s perspective. Nameless and without memories of anything but pain and violence, Bucky hadn’t goddamn given up, not on freedom and not on being a person. He’d even managed to scrape together enough of the remnants of a heart to love Natasha.

It hadn’t been enough to save either of them then. Maybe it could be enough now.

So fuck magic space rocks and the shitty bargains they demanded. Bucky wasn’t giving up on Natasha, not yet.

* * *

His resolution felt good and all, but Bucky still needed a plan. And to develop a plan, he needed intel. Luckily for him, T’Challa and Shuri were heading back to the States a day before Stark’s funeral, as was, it seemed, most everyone else who’d been involved in the battle, and no one looked askance at Bucky hitching a ride with the Wakandans to return to the US. There were logistics to work out, recovery efforts to begin organizing, and with the Avengers’ compound in ruins, Stark’s mansion in the woods was serving as a temporary base of operations.

Bucky intended to start his mission by talking to Banner, pulling the whole “I’m just a confused, time-displaced old man, can I get a little context on just what the fuck is going on,” schtick, which wasn’t even a lie, really, but from the moment Bucky showed up, Steve wouldn’t let him out of his sight. Every time Bucky tried to wander off, he heard Steve’s faintly panicked voice calling his name, and Bucky wasn’t a monster, okay? He got that Steve was horribly traumatized on account of how Bucky had dissolved into dust right in front of him. Bucky had been there for that, thanks, and the only reason he himself wasn’t having a breakdown about it was on account of how that particular horrifying experience had to get in line behind all the other, more explicable horrifying experiences in Bucky’s life. But if Steve could just give him, like, a _minute_ of breathing room. Because Bucky was this close to pretending he was having gastrointestinal issues and “locking” himself into the bathroom.

Wilson noticed, apparently, and failed to be in any way helpful.

“Yeah, Steve’s kinda clingy right now. Can’t really blame him,” he said, then he slapped Bucky on the shoulder. “Anyway, it’s your turn to be Steve’s comforting reminder that half the planet is alive again!”

* * *

Bucky finally got his window of opportunity when Steve got called away by Thor to discuss space stuff, so he texted Steve that he was taking a walk to get away from the increasingly crowded lake house and that he’d be back soon. Which was the truth: he _was_ taking a walk. It was just that his walk ended with him talking to Banner, who was permanently big and green now, but not, apparently, a rage monster. Banner was out by the lake, tinkering with what Bucky had been reliably informed was a literal time machine, but which, just like nearly every other damn thing in the future that wasn’t in Wakanda, was a distinct disappointment on the cool science fiction aesthetics front.

“Hey, Dr. Banner,” he said. “You got a minute?”

Banner scowled down at some readout on the machine, then looked up at Bucky with a polite smile. “Sure. What’s up, Sergeant Barnes?”

“Uh, you can call me Bucky. I was just wondering—it’s been a real confusing few days for me, and I feel like I don’t know what the hell just happened. I mean, aliens, all-powerful space rocks, getting turned to dust…”

“Yeah, it’s a lot,” said Banner with a sympathetic grimace. 

“I don’t wanna upset anyone or anything, I figure it’s hard to talk about, I just—could you tell me what the hell even happened with those Infinity Stones? Steve said they were destroyed, and then everyone had to time travel to get un-destroyed versions, and now you’ve gotta return them...”

Bucky widened his eyes in what he really hoped came across as an expression of innocent, tragic confusion, and apparently it was convincing enough, because that was all the opening Banner needed. God bless professor types, they always wanted an audience to lecture to. Banner got too easily derailed by talking about all the time travel shit, but with some gentle redirection, Bucky got enough decent intel on the Infinity Stones to at least start coming up with a plan. Though Banner didn’t know much about the Soul Stone that Natasha had given her life for.

“Why’d only one of the Stones have someone guarding it? And why’d we take their word for someone needing to die to get the Soul Stone?”

Banner shrugged. “Barton said the Stone didn’t even appear until—well, you know. And he said the guardian was some kinda ghost, so no joy there. I tried to bring Natasha back along with everyone else, when I undid the Decimation, but—I could feel it, the Soul Stone wouldn’t let me. What it takes, it won’t give back.”

“Are the Stones...alive?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Banner slowly. “There’s some kind of...awareness there, I think. But they’re not alive in any way we would recognize, no.”

“Huh. Thanks for answering my questions, Dr. Banner, that’s really helped clear some things up for me.”

* * *

Bucky tried the wizard guy next, who was easy enough to find on account of how he was floating in front of the metal briefcase that now held the Infinity Stones, presumably on guard duty. He leveled a withering stare at Bucky, which was, wow, _rude_. Bucky’d never even tried to kill this guy or anything, so he didn’t know what his problem was.

“No, you cannot just ‘take a look’ at the most powerful artifacts in the universe.”

“Wasn’t gonna ask to take a look,” said Bucky mildly. “I just had a question.”

“No, I have not been to Hogwarts.”

“I don’t know what that means, but okay. I just wanted to know: are the Infinity Stones alive? Or, uh, sentient?”

Floating wizard man narrowed his eyes at Bucky. “What kind of question is that?”

“The kind of question a guy asks when his best friend is gonna be the one going on a trip through time to return them. So. Are they alive?”

“No, they aren’t living creatures,” he said. “And as for sentience...that is, perhaps, a philosophical question, and I’m not that kind of doctor.”

“Wait, you’re a doctor?” asked Bucky, thoroughly confused now. “They give people wizard doctorates now?”

The wizard doctor heaved a sigh. “I’m a neurosurgeon. Or was. And I’m not a _wizard_ , I’m the Sorcerer Supreme.”

Whatever. Still not weirder than the talking raccoon with a machine gun.

“Right. Sorry, your...supremeness. I’m only asking because Steve told me you have to sacrifice someone you love to get the Soul Stone. If the Stone’s not alive, if it’s not sentient, how does it know? How does it know you’re not just chucking any random person off the cliff?”

The wizard—sorry, _sorcerer_ —seemed to actually give Bucky’s question some thought.

“I haven’t used the Soul Stone, so I can’t be certain, but the Stones do have a certain awareness. Whether that rises to the level of sentience, I don’t know. Perhaps the guardian of the Soul Stone is given the power to make the judgment. At any rate, the guardian will not harm Captain Rogers for returning the Stone, he isn’t capable of it, given the constraints of his binding.”

“Okay. Thanks, that makes me feel a lot better.”

“How gratifying,” said the sorcerer dryly.

* * *

Bucky rejoined Steve and Wilson after that, his mind churning with ideas. There had to be a loophole, a weakness, _something_ to exploit in the Soul Stone’s apparent devil’s bargain. He just had to find it.

“Alright, Barnes?” asked Wilson, genuine concern in the attentive way he was looking at Bucky.

“Yeah, just needed to clear my head. You work things out with Thor?” he asked Steve, and Steve nodded.

“We’ve just gotta go over the plan to return his hammer and the Stones, and that’ll take care of the things we’ve got to deal with most urgently.”

“Speaking of you returning the Stones—” started Bucky, only for Steve to interrupt him with a hug, short this time, but still tight and clinging.

“We’ll talk tonight, okay? I gotta go talk to Rhodey real quick,” he said, then jogged off towards the lake house.

“Yeah, it’s been surprise hug central around here,” said Wilson. “Also, Steve going to return the Stones alone is total bullshit, right? We cannot let him return them on his own, tell me you’ll back me up on that, Barnes.”

“Obviously.”

“Why can’t he return the Stones on his own?” asked a flat voice, and Bucky and Wilson both jumped.

A blue cyborg alien-looking person popped out of one of the spaceships parked in the clearing.

“Uh, I’m sorry, who are you?” asked Wilson, and Bucky basked for a few seconds in the smug and relieved glow of a person who actually knew what was going on.

For once, he wasn’t the one baffled and lost by all the weird shit happening in the future, and for once, he had one up on Wilson. Thanks to Banner’s mini-briefing, Bucky was pretty sure this was Nebula.

“Nebula. I’m with the Guardians.” This didn’t seem to enlighten Wilson at all. “Gamora’s sister.” Still nothing. Nebula sighed. “I’m one of Thanos’s daughters.”

“Oh. Uh, that’s rough,” said Wilson.

“Yes. It is. So why can’t Rogers take the Stones back alone?”

“Because he’ll get up to some bullshit, that’s why. I don’t know what bullshit, exactly, but something.”

Privately, Bucky agreed with Wilson, but he also had an entirely practical reason for thinkingSteve shouldn’t go on his own.

“It isn’t operationally sound to send him on his own. Too many things could go wrong, and we’d have no way of knowing if the Stones ever got back to when and where they’re supposed to be.”

Nebula narrowed her big, inky eyes at him. The effect was somewhat unnerving, but hey, Bucky was a cyborg ex-assassin just like she was, so: glass houses and all that. She couldn’t help how she looked, and for all Bucky knew, maybe she thought his human eyes were creepy.

“You want to go with him,” she said, and her flat, faintly metallic tone made it hard to tell if it was a question.

“Yeah, I do,” said Bucky. “The Soul Stone is going back to some planet called Vormir, right? Is it gonna be easy to return?”

“Yes. It’s only acquiring the Soul Stone that isn’t safe. Returning it should be simple.”

“Any chance we can get Natasha back when we do?” asked Sam. “I mean, if we’re taking it back…”

“That’s not how this works, no.”

“Okay, well, how it works is bullshit,” said Bucky. “If you have to sacrifice someone you love to get the Soul Stone, then how the hell did Thanos get it?”

“He sacrificed my sister.” She snorted and shook her head sharply. “No, he _murdered_ my sister.”

Wilson gave him some kind of significant look, with wide eyes and disapproving eyebrows, but Bucky ignored it. “I’m sorry,” he told Nebula.

“You’re right though, it is—bullshit,” said Nebula haltingly, then her anger seemed to catch a spark, and she continued, low and furious, “Gamora was so sure Thanos wouldn’t be able to get the Soul Stone. She knew what price the Stone would ask, and she was certain Thanos didn’t love anything or anyone enough to count as the sacrifice. But Gamora counted, and I still don’t understand _why_.”

“I, uh, figure the family dynamic there was…not good, but she _was_ his daughter—?” started Wilson, and Nebula made an awful grating, grinding sound of pure pained negation, a _no_ that didn’t need any words.

“He called us his children, but we were his weapons. He took us apart and put us back together at his pleasure, and the only thing he cared about was that we belonged to him, and that we killed for him. It wasn’t love. Stark with his daughter, that was love, Gamora with Groot, that was love, but Thanos—I don’t _understand_. He didn’t love her, he _didn’t_. _I did_.”

Nebula’s black eyes blazed with fury, and even knowing this fraction of her and her sister’s story, Bucky was right there with her. Because what she’d just described, that was exactly how HYDRA had treated the Winter Soldier too, how the Red Room had treated Natasha, and brainwashing might have fucked Bucky up in a lot of ways, but never once had he entertained the possibility that his handlers had _loved_ him, and they’d never pretended to either. If that was what Thanos had done to his daughters, he hadn’t loved them. So why the fuck did the Soul Stone think he had? Did the all-powerful space rock just, what, take Thanos’ word for it?

“No, he didn’t love her,” Bucky told Nebula. “Which is making me wonder how the hell the Soul Stone decides what love is.”

Bucky had been looking for a loophole, and he was pretty sure he’d just found it. Whether it could be exploited or not though, and whether it could do anything to get Natasha and Nebula’s sister back…well, Bucky could figure that out later.

Nebula tilted her head at him and nodded, some of her fury subsiding. “I don’t know how it decides,” she said. “I only know Thanos didn’t love Gamora. That’s why I need to go to Vormir, I need to understand. _I’m_ the one who should go with Rogers.”

“Yeah, well, feel free to make your case, but first we gotta convince everyone that someone needs to go with Steve at all,” said Wilson.

“Probably it’s gonna need to be someone who can blend in on Earth a little better than you can,” said Bucky apologetically. “Sorry.”

“You’re part-machine just like I am,” countered Nebula, which was fair, but as bad as Bucky felt for her, he wasn’t about to let her go with Steve. That wouldn’t help Bucky’s plan at all. Although, he could use a backup plan if this tentative plan of his didn’t end up working out.

“If you want answers about the Soul Stone, you should go to Vormir after Steve takes the Soul Stone back. That way maybe you can figure out what’s up with the whole sacrifice thing. I’ll go with you, if you want.”

“Uh, what,” said Wilson.

“Why would I want you to go with me?”

“Seems like getting the Soul Stone is a two-person job, one way or the other. I figure if you go with me, some guy you don’t even know, we could find out some more about what counts as sacrificing someone you love.”

“Again, what! Barnes, what the fuck—”

“Are you volunteering to throw yourself off a cliff?” asked Nebula incredulously.

“Historically speaking, I’m really good at surviving long falls.”

Now Wilson looked truly alarmed. “Barnes!”

God, no one got his jokes.

“Calm down, I don’t have a death wish. Just think Nebula shouldn’t go alone, not if she wants answers.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Nebula, and stalked back into her spaceship.

Well, it had been worth a shot. Wilson was looking at him like he was a crazy person though.

“Barnes…are you okay?” asked Wilson carefully.

Bucky smiled at him, which didn’t seem to make Wilson any less concerned. “I’m fine,” he said.

Maybe it was just pure denial talking, but if Thanos could convince the Soul Stone that what he’d done to his daughter was love, then that meant the Soul Stone could be tricked or bargained with somehow. It wasn’t much to go on, maybe, but it was _something_. However slim the chance of getting Natasha back, Bucky had to try.

* * *

Wilson was not, apparently, convinced that Bucky was fine, because he stuck to Bucky’s side until the big meeting about returning the Infinity Stones. Steve had a lot of totally reasonable sounding reasons for going on his own—conserving Pym particles, only other person who could carry Thor’s hammer, reducing risks to the timeline, blah blah blah—but Bucky wasn’t buying it, and thankfully, neither were Sam, T’Challa, or a lot of the others.

“I just think any trips to the past should be on the buddy system,” said Lang.

“And if the task is so important, then we must have a failsafe, in case anything should happen to Captain Rogers,” said T’Challa.

“This isn’t like the time heist,” insisted Steve. “I’m just putting the Stones back, it’s not a two-person job.”

“You’ll be traveling through time with the most powerful objects in the universe, I think that demands a measure of prudence in the form of a partner,” said Okoye.

“I’ll go with you,” Bucky said. “No chance of me running into myself, and I can do stealth, if it’s needed.”

“I can’t risk—” started Steve, and Bucky raised an eyebrow.

“Can’t risk what? If it’s dangerous, then you shouldn’t go on your own. Not with what’s on the line here. If it’s not dangerous, if it’s a walk in the park and you can do it on your own, there’s nothing to risk. So why not play it safe?”

Steve’s jaw was taking on a familiar stubborn tilt, but Bucky was not giving in on this. Not when he was right, and not when Natasha was on the line. Whatever doubts Wilson might have had about Bucky’s mental stability, he backed Bucky up now.

“Steve, come on. Someone’s gotta go with you to have your back. Me, Barnes, Tic-Tac over there, I don’t care who goes with you, but someone’s gotta.”

Banner frowned and nodded. “They’re right, Steve. The Ancient One…she seemed real insistent that the Infinity Stones have to get put back exactly when and where we took them from. We can’t leave room for error if we can avoid it. We used the buddy system to get the Stones, we should use it to put them back.”

There was a murmur of agreement all around, thank fuck.

“I could go with Cap,” said Barton. “I _should_ go with Cap.”

Steve looked between Bucky and Barton, eyebrow furrow of unhappiness carving a deep chasm on his forehead. He was clearly torn between wanting to keep Bucky safe and not wanting to put anyone else at risk if he could avoid it. Bucky felt a twinge of guilt about pushing Steve so hard, but it was the same old self-sacrificing bullshit that Steve always pulled. Bucky wasn’t going to let him get away with it, not this time, and he wasn’t above playing dirty. Natasha would approve, he was sure.

“You have your family to think of, Barton,” Bucky said. “I should go with Steve.”

Steve narrowed his eyes at Bucky, and Bucky raised his eyebrows, daring Steve to call him out on the low blow. He wasn’t _wrong_ , dammit, and Steve knew it. There was some more argument and discussion after that, but in the end, everyone agreed: Steve and Bucky would return the Infinity Stones.

Bucky’s crazy plan was really coming together. He just needed a little more intel.

* * *

Bucky approached Barton after the meeting broke up.

“Hey. Do you have a minute? I wanted to ask you about Vormir.”

Barton scowled at him and crossed his arms.

“That was dirty pool, you bringing up my family, Barnes.”

“Yeah, maybe,” allowed Bucky with a shrug. “But I wasn’t wrong. So, Vormir? Anything me and Steve need to worry about there? I like to be prepared.”

“I’m guessing no one has to die to return that damned rock, so no, you two haven’t got anything to worry about,” said Barton with an insincere smile.

“And the guardian?” pressed Bucky.

“Basically a ghost.” Barton’s jaw worked, and he crossed his arms. “Listen. If I can’t go, then you gotta do something for me. If you can, bring Nat home. Her—her body, I mean. It—there was a cliff, and—she shouldn’t rot on some alien planet, she should get the same kinda funeral Stark’s about to get, you know? So just—just bring her home. Please.”

If that was all Bucky found on Vormir, a body—he swallowed hard. _No_. He wasn’t giving up on hope yet. He was going to bring Natasha back, alive and well.

“Yeah, of course,” said Bucky. “I promise. Um, I’m sorry for asking, but—when you got the Stone, did you—did you feel anything, or do you know how it knew, uh—”

“I don’t know. All I could think of was Nat. I keep going over and over it, thinking about what I should’ve done different, but I don’t know. She was faster than me, she—we both went over the edge, but she let go. She _let go_. And it should’ve been me.”

Some dark and bitter thing inside Bucky thought, _yeah, it should have,_ but he shoved it back down. If it had been him and Steve on Vormir, trying to get the Soul Stone, Bucky knew that he would’ve done the exact same thing Natasha had.

Barton scrubbed at his face, but his tears kept falling anyway. Grief and guilt had ravaged him more than any of the other Avengers who’d lived through the last five years, and though he had his family back, a palpable aura of despair still hung around him. This wasn’t a man who was particularly happy to be alive. _Oh, Natalia. Did you know what losing you would do to him?_

She probably had. But she must have counted it worth the cost, to make sure Barton went home to his wife and children, to make sure he lived. It didn’t matter either way, now. Bucky had the intel he needed: Barton loved Natasha. The Soul Stone hadn’t gotten that one wrong.

But it was Natasha who’d sacrificed herself, and she’d done it because she loved Barton, and Barton had been ready to do the same for her. That was a far cry from the murder Thanos had committed.

Did that matter to the Soul Stone? Or was it all some cruel cosmic joke, to claim the Stone needed a beloved sacrifice when any warm body would do? Bucky supposed it came down to whether the Stone was alive and aware or not. If it was…well, Bucky was gonna have some words with it.

* * *

Stark’s funeral was awkward as hell. There was no obvious etiquette for attending the funeral of the man who’d saved the world, but whose parents you’d killed, and who’d blown off your arm and tried to kill you. Steve had assured him that Stark had forgiven him, eventually— _he knew it wasn’t really you, Buck, it was me he stayed mad at for a long time—_ but that didn’t really help any. Bucky settled for being as unobtrusive as possible, and lurked towards the back with Wilson, stewing in an uncomfortable mixture of guilt, regret, and secondhand grief. As uncomfortable as the whole situation was, he didn’t push the feelings aside: they were real, and they were the least he owed Stark.

And if he was thinking about Stark, he wasn’t thinking about Natasha, and her funeral. _She’s not dead_ , insisted some part of him, but that was a step too far into being fully crazy: she _was_ dead. Bucky just hoped she wouldn’t stay that way. The universe was handing out a lot of miracles, after all—Bucky was on his third goddamn chance at life, for one thing—and Natasha deserved a miracle too, no matter what it took. If Bucky had to steal one for her, he would.

When the funeral was over, Bucky swallowed back a sigh of relief and beat a hasty retreat with the excuse of mission prep. Wilson followed him, of course.

“Why do I get the feeling you’re up to something, Barnes?” asked Wilson. “You’ve got some crazy eyes action going, you know.”

Did he? Whatever, Bucky wasn’t feeling any more crazy than he usually did. He was just focused, that was all.

“It’s nothing bad,” Bucky said. “I swear. And it might not come to anything.”

“Please just promise me you’re not about to fuck with the timeline, man. I know a lot of bad shit has happened to you, and to Steve, but we just saved the universe. I don’t wanna pop out of existence because you pull some butterfly effect bullshit.”

“I have absolutely zero intention of fucking with the timeline,” promised Bucky, because he was pretty sure saving Natasha didn’t count.

“Okay,” said Sam, and took a deep breath. “Alright. Good. If you and Steve don’t come back, I’m following your dumb time-traveling asses, you hear me?”

There was some bravado in Wilson’s tone, but the genuine tension around his eyes betrayed him: it was a little bit like the look guys got after too much time on the front, when they had the realization they wouldn’t be going home again for a long time, if at all. The five years they’d lost were starting to become real to Wilson, and with Natasha gone and Steve going on this mission, Wilson was probably lacking in many familiar reference points in all the chaos. Bucky knew the feeling. He gave Wilson his most reassuring smile.

“We’re gonna come back,” he promised. “Hell, we’ve got a goddamn time machine. You’ll barely even know we’re gone.”

* * *

“You sure you want to do this, Buck?” asked Steve.

They were suited up, packed, copiously armed, and as ready as they were going to get for a trip through time and space. Bucky nodded at Steve.

“Course I’m sure. I always tell you not to do anything stupid, and then you always go right ahead and do it. Figure I oughta come along for once, see if I can’t nip that shit in the bud.”

Steve scowled at him. “I love you, but sometimes you’re a real pain in my ass, you know that?”

“Quantum tunnel’s ready,” called out Bruce.

“Alright,” said Steve, and they both got ready to toggle their quantum wristbands. “On three: one, two, three—”

* * *

Returning the first couple of Infinity Stones and the hammer was easy: they tossed the purple stone back into its little booby trap, left Thor’s hammer in a hallway— _doesn’t matter where we leave it, Thor can just summon it_ , Steve assured Bucky—and got the red stone back into poor Dr. Foster, and all of them combined barely took five minutes. Maybe this really would’ve been simple enough for Steve to handle alone. It was when they went to return the Tesseract that Bucky realized why Steve might have wanted to do this on his own.

1970, Camp Lehigh: Peggy and Howard in the same building, and somewhere nearby, Arnim Zola. There were so many things Bucky and Steve could do here, to build a better future, to save some version of themselves. But that wasn’t part of Bucky’s mission.

“I can put the Tesseract back,” Bucky offered. “You can—you can go see Peggy, if—”

“I can’t talk to her,” said Steve, without much conviction.

“You can see her though. That won’t fuck things up.”

Steve shook his head. “Not worth the risk,” he said, and Bucky knew he meant _not worth the temptation_. “And I saw her already, last time. Come on.”

So after a couple near misses with base security, they crept into the storage area and put the Tesseract back where it belonged. Bucky was ready to hit the next point on their list, but Steve lingered, staring at the eerie blue glow of the Tesseract.

“I thought about going back to 1945 and staying there, you know,” said Steve.

“What?”

“It’s a time machine, Buck. I could—I could go back, I could fix it all: save you, have that dance with Peggy, and go through the 20th century the long way around, the way I should’ve the first time.”

It was the life Bucky would’ve wanted for Steve once, the life Steve deserved. But even with the time travel machines on their wrists, Bucky knew there was no going back like that, not really. They’d trail their ghosts behind them, burn scars into their wake, and probably ruin more than they could fix. 

“That would fuck with the timeline though, cause some kind of paradox—”

“Not so sure it would, actually,” said Steve. “When we did the time heist, when we went to 2012, I fought myself, you know, to get the Mind Stone. And I told him you were alive. That never happened to me, me now, I mean. So I must’ve created a new timeline.”

“Steve…” started Bucky, but he wasn’t sure what to say.

“Aren’t you tempted, Buck? We could find you before HYDRA got you, we could come home from the war—”

“Not sure how you imagine that working, pal. There’d be two of each of us, and I’m pretty sure that’d be bad for the multiverse or whatever.”

Steve shook his head. “It could work, if we’re careful—”

“Steve, you’ve never been careful a day in your life. You think you could just, what, lay low for the entire 20th century? Because I couldn’t. And I _like_ the future. It’s got the internet, and good food, and Shuri and Thandiwe and Oluchi, and hell, even Wilson.”

“I’m just—I’m sick of losing everything, again and again. I can’t do it anymore, Buck.”

The misery turning Steve’s face haggard and drawn sent a cold line of fear racing down Bucky’s spine. He’d seen Steve grieving and exhausted and foul-tempered, grim and pessimistic, tired and sad, but Bucky had never seen him in the grip of despair.

 _You’re usually dead for this part_ , pointed out an unhelpful part of Bucky’s brain.

Shit, Steve shouldn’t have been the one to return the Infinity Stones at all, he should’ve been benched, realized Bucky. The last five years, losing Natasha and Stark, it had all clearly broken something in Steve that hadn’t yet had anywhere near enough time to heal. If they hadn’t been mid-mission, Bucky would’ve known what to do: he’d have made Steve stay in Wakanda with him for a while, he’d have made him take a goddamn break and talk to someone. But they _were_ mid-mission, in 19-goddamn-70, and it was only Bucky here. All he could do was hug Steve and give him some comfort that was barely any kind of comfort at all.

“Staying in the past won’t undo any of it though,” said Bucky, shooting for something like Thandiwe’s gentle, matter-of-fact tones. “It’ll all still have happened to you. And you haven’t lost everything, Steve, I’m back and I’m okay, and so are Sam, and Wanda—”

Steve clung tightly to him. “But not Natasha.”

“Yeah, about that,” said Bucky slowly, and Steve pulled away from Bucky, his miserable despair giving way to confusion.

“What about Natasha?”

“Don’t you want to try to get her back?”

“How? Bruce tried, when he had the Gauntlet, and I know Tony must have tried too. It didn’t work.And I can’t see any way to save her that wouldn’t end in us causing a paradox by not getting the Soul Stone in the first place.”

“Not with time travel, at least not any more time travel than we’re already doing. Just—the Soul Stone needs a sacrifice, right? Of someone you love. Well, how the hell does it _know_?”

Steve frowned. “What—I’m not following here, Buck.”

“Nebula said Thanos killed her sister to get the Soul Stone. That doesn’t seem like love to me. So either it’s a fucked up cosmic joke and you can throw anyone off that cliff and get the Stone, or there’s some, I don’t know, wiggle room, or a loophole, or _something_.”

“A what? Bucky, I’m not sure I understand—”

Bucky shook his head, frustrated.

“Just—let’s finish the mission, okay? Return the other Stones and then go to Vormir and see—see if there’s anything we can do. Maybe Wilson’s right and I’ve lost the plot for real, but I figure we oughta at least _try_ to get Natasha back.”

“Of course we should try, of course I want her back, but— _how_? If we can’t use the Infinity Stones, if we can’t interfere with the timeline, I don’t see a way to do it.”

“I haven’t entirely worked that part out yet,” admitted Bucky. “Figured I’d wing it when we got to Vormir.”

Steve laughed, somewhere between incredulous and frantic. “Buck, that’s crazy. There’s nothing to fight, we can’t use the Stones—what are we even gonna _do_.”

Anything other than accept that Natasha was dead. Maybe Bucky was running on pure denial here, maybe he was kidding himself that they could do anything to get her back. Maybe this was just long-delayed guilt about the Red Room manifesting itself. But he couldn’t live with getting this far and not trying _something_ , anything. If Bucky could get so many damned undeserved second chances at life, then someone had to fight to make sure Natasha did too, because she deserved it a hell of a lot more than Bucky ever had or would.

“I don’t know. All I know is I’m not giving up, Steve.”

His voice came out too raw, too agonized, and Steve’s grief-heavy exhaustion lifted some, his attention sharpening.

“Alright,” he said slowly. “There a reason this is so important to you, Buck? I didn’t think you and Natasha were close. Or that you’d even talked much.”

Bucky hadn’t exactly needed confirmation that Natasha had never remembered their time together in the Red Room; it had seemed a safe assumption, given the givens. It still hurt to hear it though. Bucky didn’t want to lie to Steve, but the truth felt too big and too painful right now, like a load Bucky had only barely gotten a decent grip on. If he shared it with Steve, who was nearly bent double with the weight of the last five years’ worth of his own sorrow, super soldier strength or not, he worried they’d both be crushed.

“You love her. She helped save half the damned universe. Isn’t that enough?”

“Yeah, of course it is, I just feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“It’s not—bad. But can you—it’s something I just found out about, and I’m still working through it. I’ll tell you, I swear, just—not now. Please.”

Steve’s lips pressed together in an unhappy line. “The _only_ reason I’m not pushing this now is because we’re in the middle of a mission. You gotta tell me when we get back. Promise me.”

“I promise,” said Bucky.

* * *

Their next stop was 2012, where they dropped the Mind Stone off with an unconscious Steve. Somehow it was this that felt impossibly, vertiginously strange: not the going to another planet, or going back to 1970, no. But standing with two Steves in 2012, one conscious and one not, and Bucky was suddenly way too close to tipping over into giddy hysterics.

“You told him I’m _alive_?” he whispered to his Steve. “ _Why_?”

“We were fighting, and he thought I was Loki, and I just needed him to _stop_ for a second—”

“Oh, that’s fighting dirty, Rogers,” said Bucky, somewhere between impressed, appalled, and exasperated. “Is hearing my name all it takes for you to lose it in a fight? Because if so, we gotta work on that.” Bucky was joking, but going by the sudden wounded and guilty look on Steve’s face, his joke wasn’t far from the truth, which, _Jesus, Steve, get it together_. “What do you think he can do about it, if he even believed you?”

“I, uh, might also have said _hail HYDRA_ to Rumlow and his guys, so I could get the Mind Stone. So, uh, he’s gonna have to deal with that, I guess.”

Bucky gaped at Steve. This just got worse and worse.

“What the fuck, Steve! What kind of shitshow are you leaving this poor Steve with?”

About five dozen different terrible ways for that to play out cascaded across Bucky’s mind, each worse than the last. _Steve_ pretending to be _HYDRA._ Bucky very briefly had the wild urge to just swap Steves and take the unconscious Steve with him. It seemed only fair: his Steve had made this mess, he should fix it. But no, that probably counted as fucking with the timeline.

Steve grimaced and looked down at his alternate timeline, past self.

“He can handle it! It’ll be fine, it’ll just—you know, accelerate the timeline on the whole SHIELD-HYDRA implosion. He’ll be _fine_ , and you’ll be fine, and anyway, this timeline is not our problem,” said Steve, still looking wildly guilty, exactly like that time he’d spilled paint all over Bucky’s library books and tried to claim a rat had done it. “Now c’mon, we gotta get the Time Stone back where it belongs.”

* * *

When Banner had talked about the Ancient One, Bucky had imagined a wizened old crone kind of lady, a Baba Yaga type, but the woman waiting for them on the roof of a townhouse in Greenwich Village was no bent-backed witch. She was a bald-headed white woman, ageless and serene in that way that seemed the sole province of people who’d taken holy orders of some kind, swathed in both robes and power, and Bucky felt like a kid confessing to breaking the fine china or something as Steve handed the Time Stone back to her.

“Congratulations on saving your universe,” she said in a smooth and cultured voice.

“Thank you for lending us the Time Stone, ma’am,” said Steve, polite as ever, and the Ancient One inclined her head in acknowledgment as she tucked the green gem away.

It was now or never, figured Bucky. He very nearly raised his goddamn hand, like he was back in Sunday school, but he managed to suppress the instinct at the last second in favor of clearing his throat.

“Excuse me ma’am, I was wondering if I could trouble you for a moment of your time and ask you a question. I know you’re busy with this, uh, alien invasion and all—”

The worst of the battle was blocks away, but the Chitauri ships still loomed large in the sky, and the Ancient One was using her powers or casting spells or something even as she spoke to them, golden symbols flying from her hands as she shaped the air with the mysterious motion of her fingers.

“I can spare a moment,” she said dryly, her hands not ceasing their arcane movements. “Please, ask.”

“Is the Soul Stone alive, or sentient? And if it is, is there any way to talk to it?”

Whatever question she’d been expecting him to ask, that wasn’t it: her eyebrows went high, and her hands twitched into stillness for a half-second before continuing to weave golden light. He’d caught Steve by surprise too, judging by his sharp intake of breath, but Bucky kept his attention on the Ancient One, and hoped Steve would catch on and back him up.

“Alive...I’m not certain I’d use that word. But of all the Infinity Stones, and given the nature of its power, it has a mind of its own, yes, though not, perhaps, one that human intellects would find easy to understand. Why do you ask?”

“My friend Natasha died to get us the Soul Stone,” said Steve, and Bucky bit back a sigh of relief. Good, Steve knew what Bucky was angling for, at least a little. “We undid Thanos’s genocide, but the Stones wouldn’t let us bring Natasha back.”

The Ancient One arched one fine eyebrow. “As it should be. What use is a sacrifice if it can be undone so easily?”

She had a point there. But Bucky was still convinced he might have a better one.

“Right, but the thing is, ma’am, that we think the Soul Stone’s criteria for a sacrifice are faulty.”

“An object of unimaginable power that has existed from the inception of this universe, and you think its reasoning is _faulty_ ,” said the Ancient One faintly.

“Yes. So, uh, who can we talk to about that?” asked Bucky. “The Stone’s guardian?”

“No,” said the Ancient One slowly. “There is no, shall we say, higher power to petition. You can attempt to use the Soul Stone to achieve what you seek, but you may not survive such an attempt, much less be successful.”

“Okay, but I don’t want to _use_ the Stone, I just want to talk to it.” Bucky frowned, considering, and amended, “With it, I mean, I know I can talk at the thing all I want.”

The Ancient One stared at him for a long moment. “You would need to enter the Soul Stone, I imagine.”

“Seems kinda small for that,” said Steve, and the Ancient One’s lips twitched with the vague suggestion of a smile.

“It’s bigger on the inside, shall we say.”

“Alright, so how do I get inside? And is it safe?”

“If the Soul Stone remained Captain Rogers’ possession, then he could simply ask it to let you in, and then demand that it release you once your little chat was over, I suppose,” she said, considering. “That would be a trivial enough use of the Soul Stone’s powers, nothing complex enough to demand much energy or focus from Captain Rogers. Captain Rogers would find it uncomfortable, at most.”

Finally, a real, actionable _plan_. 

“And what about Bucky? Would it be safe for him?”

Now the Ancient One smiled, wry and amused. “That depends entirely on what he does in there.”

* * *

On Vormir, they argued about Bucky’s plan during the whole climb up the mountain.

“Buck, this isn’t a plan, it’s _insanity_. Are you seriously asking me to _put you in the Soul Stone_ so you can _argue_ with it? And somehow convince it to give Nat back? No!”

“Okay, it’s not the best plan, I admit, but c’mon, it’s not _insane_. At the very least, it’ll count as recon.”

They went back and forth like that as they traveled the steep switchback paths that led up the mountain, where apparently the guardian of the Soul Stone was waiting: Steve would refuse and Bucky would cajole, then plead, and then Steve would refuse and the whole cycle would start all over again.

“Isn’t it worth trying?” asked Bucky, only to get an emphatic head shake from Steve.

“Not if it means I risk losing you too! I can’t lose you again, Bucky, I can’t. I just got you back,” pleaded Steve.

“There isn’t a risk,” Bucky insisted. “If you’re using the Stone, then I’m as safe as I can get.”

“You heard the Ancient One, she said your safety depends on what you do in there—”

“—and all I’m gonna do is, you know, look around and ask some questions—”

“Oh, okay, if that’s all! Jesus Christ, Buck, you’re acting like this is a friendly chat—”

By the time they’d reached the summit, they’d gone half a dozen rounds back and forth, the unstoppable force of Steve’s adamant refusal meeting the immovable object of Bucky’s stubbornness, again and again. Bucky wasn’t willing to give up, not when he was so close, but Steve wasn’t willing to give in either.

“Let me do it,” said Steve in the end. “You use the Stone, I go in and, I don’t know, do this recon you’re talking about, ask whatever questions you want asked.”

Bucky glared at Steve, unimpressed.

“Don’t goddamn patronize me, Rogers. Just let me do this please. It’s the goddamn least I owe Natasha.”

“Is this about that time you shot her?” asked Steve, incredulous. “Because she never blamed you for that—”

“No,” Bucky said. “This is about the Red Room.”

Some of Steve’s argumentative momentum dissipated in favor of surprise as he visibly thought it through and connected the dots: the Soviets’ Winter Soldier files, Natasha’s time in the Black Widow program, Department X’s HYDRA ties. It didn’t take him long to reach the right conclusion.

“You knew her there,” Steve concluded. “You knew each other.”

“Yeah.”

“But she never said anything—” said Steve, almost as if to himself, and Bucky laughed, half bitter and half hysterical.

“Take a guess why, Steve. She didn’t remember. They made _sure_ she didn’t remember. And that’s on me.”

“It’s not your fault, Bucky,” said Steve, a too-common refrain by now, practically an automated response, and just like always, hearing the words didn’t much help.

“I put her in the chair. They said _the fucking words_ , and I dragged her into it and _watched_ —”

Now Steve looked sick with misery and something too close to pity, and Bucky couldn’t stand to look at him. He turned away and tried to breathe, slow and steady, in and out, but grief and guilt turned the air in his lungs jagged, as if he’d run full-speed all the way up this damned mountain.

“Oh, Buck,” Steve said softly. “And then they put you in the chair too?”

“They didn’t have to. Ten fucking words was all it took. They ordered me to sit in it, so I sat in the damn thing myself. And then they took _everything_. I shot her, and I didn’t know her, I fought her again and again and I didn’t know her, I finally talked to her as my own damn self and I _didn’t know her_ , and then you told me she was dead and I—”

Bucky clamped a hand over his mouth and stopped the frantic torrent of words. He hadn’t fucking wanted to tell Steve all that, not here, not now. So much for not putting all his shit on Steve. He looked out at the barren alien landscape of Vormir, at the unrelenting dull grayness of it, listened to the sound of his ragged breathing and its calmer counterpart in Steve, and tried to pull himself together.

“It wasn’t your fault,” repeated Steve, his tone admitting no doubt. “Natasha would have told you the exact same thing.”

Bucky turned back to Steve, and saw the expected expression of devastation. But worse still than the devastation was the tenderness, the raw and wounded mix of love and grief. He shouldn’t have told Steve. It didn’t make any of this better. But goddammit, Bucky couldn’t give up.

“Then let her tell me that herself. I don’t care if she never remembers, I don’t care if she ends up not giving a damn about me, just let me try to get her back. She deserves that much from me, from us. Steve, please.”

“You loved her,” murmured Steve, then shook his head and corrected himself. “You loved each other. You were in love.”

“As much as whatever was left of me could be in love, yeah. She almost made me feel like a person again, you know? And they punished us both for that.”

Steve pulled him into a loose hug and rested his forehead against Bucky’s, a better comfort than anything he could say.

“Alright,” said Steve. “Alright, fine, let’s do this.”

* * *

The plan, such as it was, was this: they’d get up to the top of the mountain, where Barton had told them the Soul Stone’s guardian was, and they’d see what information they could get from him. Then Steve would use the Stone on Bucky, and Bucky would, in short, ask the damned Soul Stone what the hell its problem was.

“After five minutes, I’m pulling you out,” said Steve. “We’ve got no idea if time works the same in there. If it’s fine, you can go back in after that.”

Bucky conceded that this was a fair point, and they finished the climb up to meet the guardian.

The guardian of the Soul Stone was a ghostly figure, as grey as the mountains surrounding it, and Bucky was getting some real Ghost of Christmas Future vibes, until the guardian floated closer.

“Oh, wonderful, as if my cursed existence isn’t cursed enough. You two are still alive?”

The accented voice was vaguely familiar, but the gaunt red face could only be one person. “Oh, what the fuck,” said Bucky. “You seeing this, Steve?”

“Schmidt?” asked Steve incredulously. “You’re still _alive_?”

“Do I look alive?” snapped the Red Skull, gesturing irritably at his whole skeleton ghost situation. “I am _cursed_ , Rogers. If you’re here for the Soul Stone, you’re moments too late.”

“Here to ask some questions, actually,” said Bucky, forestalling Steve’s outraged confusion. Bucky didn’t give a shit how the Red Skull had ended up on Vormir, he was on a mission here. “Are you the one who decides who gets the Soul Stone?”

“Again, what part of _cursed_ do you not understand. My soul is chained to the Soul Stone, apparently for eternity, and I am cursed to guard it and inform seekers of the cost to acquire it. A sacrifice of someone you love is required. There is a convenient cliff in that direction,” the Red Skull said, extending one skeletal finger. “That’s it, that is the extent of my role in this eternal purgatory.”

“Wow, cranky,” muttered Bucky. “How’d you get cursed?”

“I attempted to gain the Stone without an appropriate sacrifice. I thought I was almost free when the woman died for the Stone, and yet, here I am! Still trapped here!”

“Good,” said Steve. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.”

They tried asking the ghost Red Skull more questions about the Soul Stone, but he didn’t have any useful information, beyond confirming that the Soul Stone seemed to have something of a mind of its own. Then they had a quick shout-whispered argument about whether they should take out the Red Skull, finish the job they’d started 80 years ago, which the Red Skull broke up by saying _I can hear you, you idiots_ , and reminding them that he was already dead for all intents and purposes.

“An exorcism then,” retorted Steve, scowling over at where Red Skull was floating ominously.

“Whatever, we’ll deal with him later, first you gotta get me into the Soul Stone.”

“Wait, you have the Stone—” started Red Skull, and they ignored him.

Steve opened up the briefcase that held the last remaining Infinity Stone, and lifted the Soul Stone out carefully.

“You’re sure about this, Buck? I’ve never used one of these things before, I can’t guarantee I won’t fuck this up.”

“If Stark and Banner could do it with all five of them, you can handle one. Come on, just do it.”

Steve took a deep breath, and gripped the Soul Stone as golden light began seeping out from between his clenched fingers.

“I’m pulling you back out in five minutes,” he warned. “You better stay alive in there.”

And then there was a flash of amber, honey-colored light, and Vormir disappeared.

* * *

For one panicked moment of blank nothingness, Bucky was sure he’d just been turned into goddamn dust again, but when his vision cleared, his hands were real and solid, all of him present and accounted for. His lungs took in air and his heart beat steadily, so wherever he was, he was alive. He took in his surroundings: all around him in every direction was a featureless plain, the golden, amber-colored ground practically indistinguishable from the slightly more orange sky above it. Bucky wondered if Steve could see him in the Soul Stone, like some sort of ancient bug caught in sap that had turned to amber.

He sure as hell _felt_ seen, his skin prickling with the press of some invisible, omnipresent attention. He walked for a little while, picking a direction at random, then stopped after what felt like a minute; the lack of perspective thanks to the featureless landscape was making Bucky’s head spin, and it seemed to make no difference to the unshakable feeling of being observed.

“Hello?” he called out. “Can you, uh, hear me? I’d like to speak with the Soul Stone please!” He waited for an answer, and wondered what an answer would even sound like. “Hello? I had a question for you.” Still, silence. And yet, that sense of attention. Bucky figured that was as much as he was going to get, and went ahead and asked his question. “How do you know if the sacrifice to get, uh, you, is made out of love?”

There was a minute shift in the air, and the hairs on the back of Bucky’s neck prickled.

_I am the Soul Stone. Souls are my dominion. I know._

It both was and wasn’t a voice, something more understood than heard. Was the Soul Stone reading his mind? The possibility was disquieting, but Bucky hadn’t come this far to let a little bit of spooky mind-reading put him off.

“Really? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you just decide murder is okay, as long as the person doing the murdering claims to have loved their victim.”

Either the goad or the question worked, because a figure appeared, hazy at first and then gathering form and specificity: Natasha, tinted golden as if lit by a setting sun. Traitorous joy flashed bright in him, but no—he looked closer. It was Natasha, yet not Natasha, the too-smooth face like a mannequin or statue, no life or emotion animating it, only some enormous and inhuman presence alight behind the eyes, which were golden rather than green. This wasn’t Natasha, no. It was the Soul Stone stealing her face.

“Take someone else’s face, not hers,” he told it, and with one placid blink, the figure in front of him shivered and went blank, now a mannequin in truth, faceless and smooth, only the faintest suggestions of human features. Eerie as it was, it was better than the thing taking Natasha’s beloved form.

“Natalia Alianovna Romanova gave her life of her own accord, in love and in faith.”

There was no mouth for the voice to come from, and yet Bucky heard it, a strange and echoing thing, as if made up of many different voices coming through a tinny phone line.

“Gamora didn’t,” countered Bucky, Nebula’s furious grief still fresh in his mind. “Thanos came for the Soul Stone—for you—and he killed his own daughter, after years of treating her like a weapon. I want to know why the hell that counted.”

The humanoid figure of the Soul Stone tilted its head.

“That hasn’t happened yet, not here.”

“What do you—oh.”

 _Fuck_. In all the confusing mess of lost years and time travel, Bucky had lost track of just when and where he was. This was the _past_ , and likely a different timeline too. This version of the Soul Stone hadn’t been used by Thanos, might never be used by Thanos at all. Well, there went that attempt to exploit a loophole, and his five minutes had to be nearly up.

“But it has happened,” added the Stone.

“Not in this timeline,” said Bucky slowly.

“ _Timeline_. What a woefully two-dimensional term. We are beyond that. Causality is more complex than you can fathom, and we have quite the pretty tangle of it just now, thanks to the Mad Titan. So it has not happened here, yet, but it has happened, and the effects have rippled into what you would call the past and the future, of multiple ‘timelines,’ including the one I currently exist in. I am aware of what the Mad Titan did to become master of the Infinity Stones.”

Alright, so maybe Bucky still had a shot here.

“So can you answer my question? Why did what Thanos did earn him the Soul Stone?”

“The criteria were met. A sacrifice was made, the sacrifice was loved.”

Which wasn’t exactly an explanation, thought Bucky, frustrated. He was beginning to suspect that this would be about as productive as arguing with a computer. Maybe the Soul Stone ran on some sort of inflexible programming rather than any kind of sentience that could be reasoned with or questioned.

“Okay, but how do you know the sacrifice was loved?” tried Bucky.

“In your universe, I unmade the Mad Titan. I saw his soul down to its very essence. He loved Gamora.”

Which was bullshit, and if Nebula couldn’t be here to speak for her sister, then Bucky would.

“If you think that, then you don’t know what love is.”

The humanoid figure of the Soul Stone leaned forward, and even without eyes to give him a cue, Bucky could sense its intent focus.

“Explain,” demanded the Soul Stone. “And explain your purpose here.”

“I want Natalia Alianovna Romanova back. And I know her sacrifice mattered, that she did it out of love, but from where I’m standing, she never should have had to make it at all, because Thanos never should’ve gotten the Soul Stone in the first place.”

“Because you, a mortal human bound by corporeality, limited to a paltry few decades of life on one backwater planet, believe you know what love is better than I do.”

Well, when the Soul Stone put it like that, it didn’t sound great. But Bucky was committed to this plan now, and he was going to see it through. He swallowed hard and met the Soul Stone’s eyeless stare.

“I think I know better than a fancy rock that’s been stuck on one desolate planet for how ever many thousands of years, with only the ghost of the Red Skull for company, yeah.”

“A bold claim,” said the Soul Stone, and Bucky didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that it sounded sort of amused. “Let us see if it is true.”

Then before Bucky could ask any more questions or pull back, the Soul Stone reached out a hand, and pushed it into Bucky’s chest.

It didn’t hurt, exactly. It mostly felt tingly, and Bucky had the vague sense that whatever the Soul Stone was doing, it wasn’t doing it to his body, because the Stone’s hand had passed harmlessly through his clothes and his chest, as his heart still beat and his lungs still took in air, faster than normal but otherwise the same as usual. _This isn’t so bad_ , he thought, before the Soul Stone’s otherworldly hand gripped something inside of Bucky, something intangible but evidently vital, and he fell to his knees, gasping.

The Soul Stone pulled something glowing from his chest, a glowing mass of something that pulsed and flickered and shivered frantically, its movement reminiscent of a bird struggling to free itself from a predator’s grip. Was that his soul, Bucky wondered distantly, and where fear should have been, he felt nothing but cold, a freezing emptiness like the bare scaffolding of a house with a blizzard raging through it.

“A shame I can’t keep this one,” said the Soul Stone. “What a remarkable soul you have, James Buchanan Barnes. How do you fit all of this inside that mortal flesh, I wonder.”

Bucky didn’t know what that meant: all he saw was a big amorphous cloud of blue-white light shot through with inky shadows, roiling unhappily where the Soul Stone cupped it between its two hands. It was pretty, he supposed, almost like the pictures satellites took of galaxies or nebulae, the light and shadow billowing and expanding, reaching towards him, as if it wanted to escape the Stone’s grip and return to him, before the Soul Stone patted it gently back into a more orb-like shape between its hands.

“What are you doing?” he managed to ask, his voice coming out thin and strange.

“Don’t worry, I’ll put it back. Let’s just see what you think love is,” the Soul Stone said, then it plunged its hands into the mass of light, into his _soul_ , until all he could see and feel was an overwhelming, suffocating press of gold.

* * *

Bucky knew what it felt like to be laid out on a table and taken apart, dissected, flayed open.

For all that there was no pain, this was worse than that, in its own way. HYDRA, after all, had never found his soul, had never run their fingers through it and pulled parts out for inspection.

 _Less than five minutes, and Steve will pull you out_. _You can take it for less than five minutes,_ he told himself, before the searching tug of the Soul Stone’s hands on his soul pulled him under a tide of feelings and memories.

* * *

His parents, his sisters, his family: love as warmth and comfort, the safety and security of belonging. Care received and care given, and fights too, arguments and frustration, but always with the knowledge of love, a stable foundation, both the soil their family tree grew from and the sunlight that nourished it. The Stone lingered here, dredging up every faded, beloved memory it could find: his father reading to him, his mother singing him to sleep, his sisters in his arms, Bucky braiding their hair and playing with them and helping them with their homework, the family dinner table full of laughter and conversation, his mother showing him how to bake bread, his father’s tears as he sent Bucky off to war, the way he’d had to force his hands to release their shaky grip on Bucky’s uniform and let Bucky go, Bucky’s fruitless attempts to comfort him.

Bucky missed them, desperately.

 _Dad never wanted me to go to war. He never wanted me to have to fight like he did_ , he told the Stone. _He wanted a better life for me_.

 _To spare you pain, his pain. You say that is love_ , said the Soul Stone, and Bucky said, _yes_.

Then, Steve: from schoolyard to battlefield, the Smithsonian exhibit had said, like that could sum up decades of them being tangled up in each other. In the Soul Stone’s careful grip, their love for each other was a fiercely bright and stubborn thing, a challenge to the world and to each other, both of them hanging on so tightly to each other that it had taken death, again and again, to tear them apart, and not even that had been permanent. _But you hurt him_ , said the Stone, _tried to kill him, and you call that love?_ Shame and guilt almost pulled Bucky under, almost made him doubt, but no— _I knew him before I knew my own name_ , he told the Stone. _I loved him enough that not even being unmade could erase it._ What he and Steve were to each other, that was one of Bucky’s few sure things, one stable point in an always shifting world. 

The Soul Stone pulled a burning bright thread out of the light in its hands, a thread that gleamed and sparkled as it stretched into the distance—or not a thread, but a cable, knit tough and tight and strong. _Your souls are bound together, did you know? You have chosen that?_ And Bucky hadn’t known that, actually, but it didn’t surprise him so Bucky said _yes_.

Then there was the 107th and the Howlies and Peggy Carter, battlefield love, foxhole devotion, and the Stone said, _you sacrificed for them, again and again_ , and Bucky thought of the camp at Kreischberg, of saying _take me not him_ ; he thought of the shots he’d taken from dozens of different sniper’s nests and the bullets he’d thrown himself in front of and the nightmares he’d endured and the choice he’d made to stay, for Steve, for the Howlies, and he said _yes_.

The Soul Stone sifted through dozens of small loves next, all of them like little gleaming jewels: old girlfriends, friends, coworkers, Mr. Rabinowitz the grocer who’d always asked after Bucky’s family and praised Steve’s art, Colonel Phillips, who’d been a tough asshole but careful with his men’s lives, Bucky’s old teachers, who’d pushed him towards college... _these too_ , asked the Soul Stone, _all these little kindnesses are love too?_ And Bucky said, _yes_.

Next came the deep wells of pitch-black shadow, the Winter Soldier, less all-consuming than Bucky might have expected, more a contrast to all the light than anything that could overtake it. The Stone rummaged around in the airless dark of those heavy shadows, dredging up despair and rage. _No love here?_ it asked, and plucked out Zola’s sadistic glee, Karpov’s possessive greed, Pierce’s smug satisfaction. _They valued you_. And all Bucky had in answer to that was howling fury, a vast well of _no_ , of _fuck you, that’s not love, you don’t love a weapon_ and the Stone hummed thoughtfully. _No, I suppose not_ , it said. _They never reached your soul. Wanted to shove it even deeper and smaller in here, as if there’s enough room, if they couldn’t kill it_.

No, Bucky supposed HYDRA hadn’t ever reached his soul. They’d just tried to sever it from all the rest of him, like it was inconvenient, unnecessary. But Natasha had reached it, had seen it, and now, finally, Bucky offered something up rather than just letting the Soul Stone take it first. It seemed inadequate now, a small and struggling bonfire compared to small suns, his and Natasha’s best attempt at love when neither of them had even really known what love was, not in the Red Room. They’d tried, though. God, they’d really fucking _tried_ , stealing every chance at closeness, at tenderness, at being human together in a place that had done its damndest to stamp all the human frailties and desires and kindnesses out of them.

 _This is why you have challenged me? For a stillborn love that neither of you remembered?_ asked the Soul Stone.

And Bucky said _yes_.

The Soul Stone’s searching turned more thoughtful then, its hands sifting carefully through gossamer strands of light, as sweet and plentiful as cotton candy: Bucky’s love for Wakanda, for Shuri and Oluchi and Thandiwe, for Thabo and the village children, for T’Challa and the Queen Mother, for every person who’d offered him a kind and safe welcome when he had done nothing to deserve it; for Steve’s teammates like Wilson and Maximoff, who’d kept Steve safe when Bucky couldn’t; and for all the small, beautiful moments of his new freedom, sunshine and fresh plums and swimming in the village lake and walking under the clear night sky.

And the Soul Stone asked, _Still, after so much cruelty and pain?_ and Bucky said, _yes_.

There was silence and stillness for a long moment, and then the Soul Stone gathered up Bucky’s soul carefully, with wondering and gentle hands.

 _I think I understand now,_ it said.

* * *

When Bucky came back to himself, he felt full in some intangible way, too big to fit inside his own skin and restless with it. But he was alive and unhurt, if shaky, so there was still a chance he could pull this off, or at least survive to try a new plan.

“You may have had a point, James Buchanan Barnes,” said the Soul Stone.

“What?” Bucky said faintly, and got back to his feet. Jesus, why hadn’t Steve pulled him out yet? It had to have been five minutes by now.

“About knowing what love is. I have been...complacent, perhaps. Isolated for too long. Thanos should not have had mastery of any version of me.”

Holy shit, had Bucky’s plan _worked_?

“So, Natasha—”

“I cannot undo what was accomplished with all of the Infinity Stones, but the sacrifices will be returned. I will even grant you a boon, James Buchanan Barnes. The soul remembers what the mind cannot. And the soul of Natalia Alianovna Romanova is as annoyingly persistent as yours is.”

The Soul Stone waved its hand, and there Natasha was, her hair in a disheveled braid, exhausted circles under her eyes and old tear tracks staining her pale cheeks, but her expression was the furthest thing possible from beaten down or despairing: there was focus and urgency in the brightness of her eyes and the set of her jaw. It seemed Bucky wasn’t the only one who’d had the idea to have words with the Soul Stone, because Natasha was mid-argument, all her attention on the mannequin-blank figure of the Soul Stone. This was no eerie doppelganger or simulation; it was Natasha, human and real and still not giving up. And Bucky still loved her.

“The fact that both Clint and I were willing to be the sacrifice really should prove that—”

“Natasha,” he said, and she spun to face him, equal parts hope and devastation writ large across her face.

“Don’t,” she said, her voice scraped raw. “I’m already dead, you don’t need to play games with me, you dumb rock—”

“Natasha,” he said again. “It’s me, Bucky. It worked, the Avengers got all of us back. Stark—Stark didn’t make it, but everyone else is fine, Steve has the Soul Stone and he’s about to return it. I’m—I’m here to bring you home.”

“But—how?” she asked, and then her eyes went wide. “Don’t tell me you’re trading yourself for me, you idiot—”

“No trade,” said the Soul Stone. “I am simply rectifying an error. Thanos should not have received the Soul Stone in your reality. Your sacrifice here should not have been necessary.”

“So you’re here to take me home,” Natasha said, her voice wavering somewhere between a question and total disbelief, but her eyes still fixed on him.

“It’s really me.”

She reached a shaking hand out to him and he took it, letting her tug him to her so she could study him closely.

“This is new,” she said, rubbing her thumb over the vibranium knuckles of his left hand, then she traced her fingers down one of the golden seams that peeked through the shifting plates.

“You saw it before the big battle,” Bucky said, and she nodded. “Shuri made it for me.”

“But I didn’t get the chance to really look at it,” she murmured, still looking carefully at his left hand. “This is real,” she said. “You’re real. My Soldier.”

Then she looked up at him, and Bucky knew: she remembered.

“Yeah,” he said. “Your Soldier. I’m sorry. For everything, but especially for putting you in the chair, for letting them—”

Natasha laughed. “You’re sorry? Soldier—Bucky, I’m sorry. I’m the one who got us caught, you kept warning me, kept begging me to be careful, but I was such a damned idiot, I was so stupidly sure of myself—I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I left you there, I’m sorry I never remembered—”

“I didn’t remember either—” he started, but before he could continue, Natasha kissed him.

It was sweet and chaste, and her aim was a little off, their lips not quite lining up, but it was a real kiss, a tentative promise of more to come in the brief press of her lips against his. It was more than he’d ever expected to have. Maybe this wasn’t a stillborn love after all. Maybe it could be reborn into something new and true, now that they were both free.

“Let’s go home,” Natasha said, then she laughed, giddy and beaming. “I figure we’re even now, one way or the other. So no more apologies, no more regrets.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Bucky, and then they just smiled goofily at each other, still holding hands.

The Soul Stone stepped forward and tipped its still featureless head. “Please continue your touching reunion somewhere that is not inside of me,” it said, and they both startled and turned back towards the Soul Stone.

“Right, sorry. Sure,” Bucky said, before remembering his manners and adding, “Thank you. Hey, what should we do, once we’re back out? And what about Gamora?”

“She will be returned to your timeline’s Vormir.”

“How’s that going to work?” he asked, frowning.

“Just because your soul is pretty does not mean your tiny human mind can comprehend the complexities of the multiverse and my powers, James Buchanan Barnes. Go, both of you. All that remains is for your friend to return me.”

The impossibly long five minutes must have finally been up, because before Bucky could bother the Soul Stone with any more questions, the golden amber realm of the Soul Stone dissolved away, leaving the dull gray of Vormir behind, and Steve, still standing with the Soul Stone in his hand, wide-eyed and pale with worry.

“Buck, are you okay, did I do it right—Natasha?”

Natasha practically tackled Steve with a hug, and Steve held her with slack-jawed disbelief.

“Hey, so it turns out that my so-called ‘insanity’ actually worked!” Bucky told Steve, beaming.

“What? How the hell did you manage to talk the Soul Stone into giving Natasha back in five minutes?” demanded Steve.

“Felt like a hell of a lot longer than five minutes,” Bucky said, beginning to suspect that time really had passed differently in there. “Managed to get Nebula’s sister back too, she’ll be waiting in our timeline’s Vormir.”

“How?”

“Convinced the Soul Stone that Thanos should never have gotten our timeline’s version of the Soul Stone in the first place.”

“Oh is that what you did?” said Natasha. “Because I thought the Soul Stone just took a liking to your, and I quote, ‘pretty soul.’”

“Listen, I’ll tell you the whole story when we get back, but first you have to return the Soul Stone, Steve.”

After some discussion on just what would constitute returning the Soul Stone—dropping it on the ground? Handing it to the Red Skull? Bucky really should have asked—they settled on Steve throwing it over the cliff. At the top of the arc of Steve’s throw, the Soul Stone glinted with a bright flash of amber-colored light and disappeared.

Steve and Natasha were occupied resetting the coordinates on Natasha’s quantum wristband, so it was only Bucky who noticed the vortex of dust and light that began swirling at the cliff’s edge. He pulled out his gun and aimed at the center of increasingly opaque vortex.

“Hey, you two maybe want to hurry it up, we’ve got a potential hostile—”

But just as Steve and Natasha looked up, the vortex collapsed to reveal a humanoid figure, one that looked a lot like the robot man the Vision, only smaller, with gray and warm golden skin, an amber jewel embedded in its chest. Bucky didn’t recognize the figure’s facial features—they had the too-symmetrical smoothness of something created artificially—but when its eyes met his, he recognized it. It was the Soul Stone.

“Peace, James Buchanan Barnes,” said the Soul Stone, and its voice was still the same eerie, many-voiced thing it had been inside the Soul Stone’s realm. “I mean no harm.”

“Is that—” started Steve, and Bucky nodded.

“It’s the Soul Stone, yeah. Hi. Why are you, uh, in a body now?”

“Is there no end to your questions?” said the Soul Stone, but it didn’t sound mad or anything.

“They’ve gotten me pretty good results so far,” Bucky said, unapologetic.

“Well, I am in a body now thanks to you. You said I knew nothing of love, isolated as I was on this empty planet. So I will leave it, and learn.”

“Um, congratulations, I guess?” said Natasha.

“Good luck?” offered Bucky.

“Thank you. Now please leave before you render the multiverse unstable with your timeline meddling.”

* * *

They returned to the quantum tunnel platform to the dulcet tones of Wilson’s imminent nervous breakdown.

“This was supposed to take _five seconds_ and now it’s been _thirty seconds_ , that is _six times as long_ as we planned, I knew it, I knew Barnes was up to something, we’ve gotta—”

“Relax, Wilson, I think you’ll be pretty happy with what I was up to,” Bucky said.

Wilson stopped pacing and whirled to face the platform. “Natasha? But—”

Banner leaned heavily against the platform controls, face slack with shock. “Please don’t tell me you two grabbed another timeline’s Natasha,” he said faintly.

“Was that an option?” asked Natasha with mild interest, raising an eyebrow at Bucky, and he shook his head.

“No, Bucky apparently...talked the Soul Stone into giving Natasha back,” said Steve, and at the disbelieving blank looks he got at that, he just shrugged. “Yeah, no, I have no idea what’s going on either. I’m just—happy he did.” Steve laughed then, incredulous and teary. “Holy shit, I’m so goddamned happy.”

“Honestly, what’s a girl gotta do around here to get a nice congratulations on coming back from the dead welcome?” said Natasha, and that seemed to break the spell of disbelief as Banner and Wilson rushed forwards to hug her and barrage her with questions.

Because Bucky was a good best friend, he hugged Steve and gave him some cover to have a happy breakdown with relative privacy, and as Steve sniffled into his shoulder, Bucky silently resolved to get Steve a minimum of 24 hours of uninterrupted privacy and rest.

“How’d you do it, Buck? Really?” asked Steve, his voice still thick with tears. “Tell me you didn’t make some kinda terrible bargain.”

Bucky would need to give a proper debrief eventually. But this wasn’t Cap asking his NCO, this was Steve asking his best friend to tell him everything was going to be fine, so Bucky told him, “No bargains, I promise. Just talked it out with the Soul Stone, found a kind of loophole, that’s all.”

Looking at Natasha now though, her eyes shining with joyful tears, her smile wide and easy, Bucky thought he’d have made any number of terrible bargains for this gift. If the Soul Stone had asked him to fight his way through some hellish afterlife, he would have, if it had demanded he find some other all-powerful space rock he would have, hell, if it had asked him to give up years of his unnaturally long life, he would have done that too. But all it had asked of him was to lay himself bare, down to his soul, and Bucky had always figured that was the price of love, when it came down to it. Natasha must have felt his eyes on her, because she looked over at him, and for once—for the first time, maybe—neither of them had to hide their reactions; not Natasha’s wonder and hope, nor Bucky’s own helpless affection.

There were a lot more tearful, happy reunions after that, which was exactly what Natasha deserved, but which Bucky was pretty superfluous for. He slipped away to find Nebula and tell her about Gamora, and found her with Stark’s daughter, playing with robot toys. The sight was incongruous but sweet: Nebula devoting absolute, solemn attention to the sober task of Morgan Stark’s make-believe robot tea party, Morgan absolutely unfazed by her own real-live alien cyborg friend.

Nebula received the news with flat disbelief and a promise to murder him if he was lying to her, and Bucky didn’t blame her. Hope could destroy a person as easily as despair could sometimes. So long as Nebula went to Vormir, Bucky didn’t care how much she threatened him.

* * *

There was an impromptu party at Stark’s lake house that night, a wild and giddy mix of a wake anda celebration. Bucky got hugged by a lot of people. Like, a lot, most of them in various states of weepy, happy inebriation. Even the _raccoon_ hugged him.

“You did a good thing, metal armed man,” it said. “Saving Natasha and Gamora. I’m not even gonna try to steal your arm any more!”

“Uh, thanks?”

“Hey, do you want a better arm? I could get you one! With a laser blaster in it! My treat! Only the finest for the man who got Gamora and Natasha back!”

“I’m fine, thanks—”

Natasha slid under his arm like she belonged there, wrapping one warm arm around his waist. “I’m pretty fond of the arms he’s got, Rocket,” she said, and Bucky flushed hot and bright.

“Fair enough, fair enough!” said Rocket with a sharp-toothed little grin. “Glad you’re back with us!” he said and left them with a sloppy toast of his drink.

Bucky couldn’t get over it. He was a _raccoon_ and he _talked_. Bucky had fought side by side with a deadly _talking raccoon_. What the fuck.

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to,” murmured Natasha. “Come get some air with me? You look like you could use some quiet.”

“I really could,” he said, and let her lead him outside, towards the little dock by the lake, marveling all the while at the simple pleasure of her hand in his, the way they had no reason to hide such casual closeness.

“Here, come sit with me,” said Natasha, already taking her shoes and socks off so she could sit on the edge of the dock, dangling her feet in the water.

Bucky followed suit, sitting close enough beside her that he could feel her steady warmth all along his right side. The water was colder than the lake by his little cottage in the Border Tribe village, but not unpleasant, and he wiggled his toes in the water.

“Everyone else has thanked you, but I haven’t,” said Natasha. “Which seems pretty damned rude of me, given that you brought me back from the dead.”

“That’s not—you’re welcome, of course, but Natasha, you don’t owe me anything. Whatever we were to each other once, I’m not expecting anything.”

Natasha nodded, and though he could see her face clearly enough by starlight, her eyes were unreadable. “We’re different people now. We’ve come a long, long way from the Red Room.”

“Yeah, we have,” said Bucky. “And I’d get it, if you wanted to forget, to leave it in the past.”

“Do you? Want to forget, I mean?”

“I didn’t remember, until Steve told me you’d died. And even then, it was just—all this grief, and I had no context for it. So I went to Shuri, asked her to help me recover the rest of my memories, the stuff from when I was the Winter Soldier. And it was—awful, but no. No, I don’t want to forget again.”

Natasha took his hand, gripped it tight.

“I don’t want to forget again either,” she said, then she tipped her face up towards him, the openness there deliberate and sweetly devastating. Had they ever been able to risk not holding anything back, before? Bucky didn’t think so. It was both thrilling and terrifying to bare it all now. “I loved my Soldier. He was as kind as he could be and careful and he gave me every bit of himself that he could. And I want to know—I want to find out if I can love James Buchanan Barnes too. If you’ll let me.”

“Yeah. I’d—I’d really like that,” he said. “Can I—can I kiss you please?”

“Such a gentleman,” teased Natasha, her eyes twinkling with reflected starlight as she leaned in towards him, and then they were kissing.

Natasha’s lips both were and weren’t familiar; there was the same plush softness, the same steady heat, but they’d never managed this kind of care before, had never trusted that it was even possible. In the Red Room, their kisses had mostly been hard and fast things, each one a desperate and defiant theft. Now, Bucky could take his time, could coax honey-slow sweetness out of a kiss, could commit every soft breath and sigh to memory. Natasha could open to him, could cup his face in her hands, her thumbs stroking gentle lines against his cheekbones, his jaw, and he could bury a hand in her hair, and they could just keep kissing, eyes closed like nothing would hurt them.

“You kiss differently now,” said Natasha when they pulled apart for breath.

“Oh. Is that, uh, a bad thing—”

Natasha laughed and shifted to sit on his lap. “It’s my favorite thing,” she said, still smiling, and kissed his hot cheek. “So’s the way you blush. This is gonna be fun, Bucky Barnes. We’re gonna do this like normal people, it’s gonna be great.”

“Yeah? Then I guess I gotta ask you out on a date, and walk you home, and kiss you at the door…”

“Okay, not 1930s normal, we can move things along a little faster than that—”

Bucky grinned, felt bashful when Natasha got bright-eyed in response, and kissed her again.

There were still a lot of things to be unsure of, after losing five years and undoing an apocalypse, but this swiftly blooming thing between them, coming back to life after a long, long winter? Bucky was sure Natasha was right: it was going to be great.


End file.
